At the University of Waterloo, "co-operative education" means that students interleave academic terms with work terms. All engineering students, including software engineering students, have 6 work terms interleaved between their 8 academic terms. Students generally require 5 successful work terms to graduate. Computer Science students are not required to pursue co-operative education, but 72% of CS students graduating between Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 graduated with co-op.
Exit survey results for the graduating SE class of 2019 emphasized student satisfaction with co-op: out of 50 responses (of 92 graduates), 41 (82%) strongly agreed and 8 (16%) weakly agreed with "The co-op portion of my engineering undergraduate program has met my expectations". The remaining response was a strong disagree.
Co-operative education is a major draw for our students, and we believe that it is a key factor behind the calibre of student that we are able to attrect. Co-op's attractiveness is helped by the current extremely healthy state of software engineering industry and the high salaries; our placement rates are always above 95% and typically highest of all of Waterloo Engineering's programs. The high salaries enable many students to pay tuition and living costs; the student-run class survey for the class of 2021 reported average hourly compensation from C$21.48 for the first co-op term to C$60.36 in the sixth term. That survey also reported that a plurality of respondents (40%) indicated that California was their favourite co-op location, with 68% having a favourite location in the United States.
Co-op drives student organizations: a major part of the Software Engineering Society's work is organizing résumé critiques and mock interviews, where senior students advise junior students about how to get jobs.
However, co-op comes with downsides as well. We have observed (and discourage!) the "Cali or bust" phenomenon, where students desperately try to get a California co-op job, believing that it is necessary to work in California to be a successful SE student. Humans can be competitive, and we understand that our students judge each other based on their co-op jobs (again, against our advice).
Further, to our knowledge, around 3% of our graduating class pursues a graduate degree. Per our exit survey, almost all graduates go on to a full-time software engineering job. As researchers, we would benefit from more of our students continuing for a graduate degree.
% TODO fact check: co-op employment rates
% https://sexxis.github.io/classprofile/
% (query 774, run 22/12/21, start term = 1209, plan group = uw.u.math.bac.cs, 501/693 have last letter "C" in plan10)