Postsecondary Co-Operative Education Programs and Minority Student Participation: Enrollment Patterns For Women, Veteran, Minority, and Handicapped Students; Selected Program Characteristics; and Exemplary Programs Serving Populations with Special Needs. Final Report.

The purposes of this document are: (1) to measure the participation of women, veterans, minority and handicapped students in postsecondary cooperative programs; (2) to provide a descriptive and comparative analysis of selected policies and practices of cooperative education programs, by institutional level and extent of women, veterans, minority, and handicapped participation; and (3) to highlight selected cooperative education and other special programs that are uniquely responsive and have attracted women, veterans, minority, and handicapped students. Approaches taken to collect data and information necessary to the study were: (1) a detailed questionnaire that was sent to 600 colleges and universities; and (2) visitation to exemplary programs, open-ended schedules and extensive written and telephone conversation. Some findings were: (1) cooperative education programs reported that they are experiencing an increase in minority and women student participation; (2) increasing numbers of women, blacks, and other minority students are entering nontraditional curricula such as engineering and other technical fields; and (3) of the total headcount enrollment reported by 150 cooperative education programs, 26 percent were women, 0.8 percent were handicapped, 13 percent were veterans, and 15 percent were male students of minority status. (Author/KE)