Michael HornThought leader creating a world where all individuals can build passions & fulfill their human potential. Author of the national bestseller Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career

Behind the Century-Old Vocational College Leaning into Work-Based Learning

Name: Behind the Century-Old Vocational College Leaning into Work-Based Learning
Uploaded: 2026-02-17T14:00:27+00:00
Duration: 1 min 48 s
Channel: Michael Horn
Description: In this monologue, a representative of a long‑standing vocational college explains the institution’s strategic shift to a co‑op‑focused model. Currently…

17 Feb 2026 · 2 min

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1:48

In this monologue, a representative of a long‑standing vocational college explains the institution’s strategic shift to a co‑op‑focused model. Currently about 30% of students—primarily those pursuing associate degrees—participate in co‑ops, and the college aims to raise that figure to 75% within two years. The co‑op program is designed to align work experience with classroom learning, offering $20 per hour wages and weekly assessments to monitor progress. The speaker argues that this integrated work‑based learning will boost job placement rates beyond the existing 80‑85% and increase starting salaries, thereby improving the overall return on investment for students.

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We know in the higher education space that co ops are powerful tools for learning. They also tend to be designed to make a four year college program take five years. But of course you're graduating with a year and a half of work experience. And so we needed to tweak that model. We are now a co op College. About 30% of our students are pursuing co ops. Our goal is to have that at the 75% level in two years. It's, it is primarily for our associate degree students, which is more than half of our students. And the idea is to have more aligned work experience with our students being able to apply what they're learning in their co op. So that makes the work that they are doing more interesting and makes the classroom learning they're doing more interesting. And to all of our co op placements, agree to a $20 an hour compensation and to an assessment so that we are checking in on a weekly basis with those students. And the idea is that the experience that our students are amassing will lead to better job placement rates even stronger than the 80 to 85% we have and higher starting salaries. So it's all interwoven. You know, the way that we are strengthening our work based learning offerings is really interwoven with better ways to serve our students and make sure they know about the return on investment and they are experiencing that and better outcomes in terms of those key three outcomes that I described.