By Ashley Osborne, News Correspondent

While national enrollment of post-undergraduate programs like Teach for America is on the rise, enrollment of Northeastern graduates in such programs is relatively small ‘- partly because its co-op program gives students skills to immediately move onto jobs after graduation, some said.
‘[Northeastern] is a very professionally-minded school,’ said Abbey Prior, the New England Recruitment Director for Teach for America. ‘But because of that, Northeastern, which I consider one of the stronger schools ‘hellip; has fewer applicants than many of the surrounding schools in any given year.’
Teach for America is an organization that recruits recent college graduates and consigns them to teach in low-income public schools over a two-year period. The organization addresses the educational inequity that faces many students from low-income backgrounds, and asserts that every student should be given the same educational opportunities, said Amanda Mills, a 2006 Teach for America corps member who now works on the organization’s recruitment team.
Mills said the group received 35,000 applications in 2008 ‘- its largest application pool since its start in 1990 and a 42 percent increase from 2007.
But since the program was founded in 1990, only 14 Northeastern graduates have completed the program, including six who entered between 2007 and 2009, Prior said. Last year alone, Boston College enrolled 35 students while Boston University and Holy Cross enrolled 30 and 20 students respectively.
A prominent reason Northeastern students participate less frequently than students from other schools is because of cooperative education opportunities, said Elizabeth Erratt, the student representative for Teach for America on Northeastern’s campus.
‘With co-op, many students either already have jobs lined up well before graduation or see Teach for America as two more years between them and ‘the real world,” Erratt said. ‘They don’t see how Teach for America can be a stepping stone into their future career.’
Co-op allows students to work with companies throughout the United States and abroad, permitting them a rare pre-emptive glance into the working world. According to the co-op department, students have received placements in companies ranging from international law firms to Microsoft to Disney.
Senior Director of the Central Cooperative Education Service Department Fred Hoskins said 90 percent of Northeastern students participate in co-op, with that number split ‘pretty much evenly’ among students who complete one, two and three co-op assignments.
With such a large percentage of students graduating with work experience, enrollment in post-college programs to suffer, as volunteer programs and post-college internships no longer seem to be as great of an opportunity, Erratt said.
Another reason Teach for America doesn’t recruit large numbers of students from Northeastern is because the program is largely unknown, she said.
‘They don’t know about Teach for America,’ Erratt said. ‘I’m finding that at other schools, the Teach for America name is instantly recognizable and it’s not at Northeastern University.’
Teach for America started actively recruiting at Northeastern in 2007, Prior said.
‘The awareness level isn’t there yet,’ Prior said. ‘The momentum hasn’t picked up.’
While Northeastern isn’t recruiting as many students as nearby schools, six of 14 Northeastern students who have participated in Teach for America have entered within the past two years. In the previous 17 years, 1990 to 2007, only eight students participated, Prior said.
At an information session held in the Stearns Career Center Sept. 17, 10 Northeastern students attended. Among those was Erratt, who herself is interested in participating in the program. While she has already completed her three co-op assignments, Erratt is looking into Teach for America for an entirely different reason.
‘Both my parents are teachers, so I really saw the education gap growing up,’ Erratt said. ‘It’s really important to me to give back ‘hellip; to give people opportunities I was lucky enough to have.’
Mills said that’s why many people get involved in the program in the first place.
‘As a common thread, people join Teach for America because they are passionate, hard-working people that want to be a part of the movement that is truly changing the face of education and the opportunities that students receive nation-wide,’ she said.