A few personal thoughts on the articles written by The Chevron, Imprint and Email response from David McKinnon with regarding to the change in the COOP policy.

This freeloading takes three forms, broadly speaking. First, a student who leaves co-op stops paying co-op
fees, which means fewer resources for CECS to find jobs for students. A few co-op fees are not really all that big a deal, and we would never stop a student from leaving co-op just because of the fee, but it is money that could be put to good use.

Unfortunately, university students are not made out of money, I’m pretty sure, I would be happy with that extra 600 bucks in my pockets, for food and other essential things.

More importantly, though, students who leave co-op after three work terms are stealing jobs from the system,
and generally really good ones. When a third year student who has found her own job leaves co-op to get it, her employer usually reduces the number of co-op listings in JobMine by one, to compensate. She didn’t “find her own job” — co-op found it for her, usually one work term earlier, and she just kept it.

Again, I’m sorry but, you can’t really expect to argue with that, so essentially you might as well extend your argument to immigrants are stealing all the jobs, thus all immigrants should be banned. This is unfortunately a free country, and thus the students have the right to steal the jobs they feel like.

The third, most subtle but possibly most important point, is that fewer senior students in JobMine means fewer
employers in JobMine. If every senior student that “found their own job” left co-op, then there would be very few senior students in co-op at all. You guys are, after all, pretty good at finding jobs! Employers don’t, as a rule, want to hire a first year student with no experience; they have to be convinced.

Perhaps when I graduate I should continue pay for the “Co-op” fee? so that I wouldn’t be stealing jobs from a first year student? No sane employer would want to hire anyone without any experience, thus, may be the students should do more than sit on their butt all day long in high school, and actually get out and do something, volunteer or not, to get some experiences? That’s what I did, and I didn’t have any problem with my first round of Co-op interviews.

And to be convinced to offer a co-op job, they often need to be sold on the idea that there are lots of senior students available. If the senior students aren’t there, many employers will think, “I don’t want to hire some ignorant first year” and not list any jobs at all. If you can lure an employer to the table with the promise of senior students, and then surprise them with the high quality of our junior students, then you can get a lot of employers to the table. This is how CECS has been so successful in finding jobs for so many
Math students over the years. Weakening the rules for leaving co-op even more than the current proposal advocates is going to make it harder for CECS to do its job.

This doesn’t mean that the employers will hire the first years, surly they will choose the most fitting student for the position. After all, they do have the ability to not rank a student.

Now, given that I’ve already done two coop terms, and as such I have somewhat limited experience with the point of views from the employer’s side. What ever said above is not always true. For my second coop term, I learned that just the department that I worked for have enough budget to hire 4 coop students, but on average they hires two coop students, and as such, they will have no problems with hiring 6 or even 8 coop students. However, the hiring process is quite tough, and most university students are either socially not qualified or is simply too lazy to go though the process. During my first coop term, I witnessed my employer going though the hiring process, and sadly, despite of their tries, and of all the upper year students, no one wanted to work for them for what ever odd reason. So really, don’t blame the upper years if the students are too unqualified and lazy.