Herman Schneider

Herman Schneider (1872 – March 28, 1939), engineer, architect, and educator, was the main founder of cooperative education in the United States and president of the University of Cincinnati.

He was born in 1872.

While at Lehigh University at the beginning of the 20th Century, he concluded that the traditional classroom was insufficient for technical students. Schneider observed that several of the more successful Lehigh graduates had worked to earn money before graduation. Gathering data through interviews of employers and graduates, he devised the framework for cooperative education (1901). About that time, Carnegie Technical School, now Carnegie Mellon University, opened and thereby minimized the need for Schneider's co-op plan in the region around Lehigh University. However, in 1903 the University of Cincinnati appointed Schneider to their faculty, and later, in 1906, allowed him an experimental year to implement his plan. Following that year, the University of Cincinnati gave him full permission for the co-op program.

His idea was that industry had the best equipment, and that it was very expensive for the University of Cincinnati to purchase equipment that would quickly become outdated. Further, there was the expense of maintaining the building. He surmised that it would take four or more years for a student trained in engineering to become familiar with an employer's needs. Then there was industrial, mechanical and civil engineering.

Schneider, beginning from the rank of Assistant Professor, rose through the rank of Dean of Engineering (1906–1928) to become President (1929–32) of the University of Cincinnati, based largely upon the strength of the co-op program. Throughout his career, he was an advocate for the co-op framework. His thirty years of service to the University of Cincinnati are partly credited for that institution's worldwide fame.

Cincinnati's example was soon followed by Northeastern University using co-op in their engineering program, in 1922 extending it to the College of Business Administration and other new colleges. By 1919, Antioch College had adapted the co-op practices to their liberal arts curricula, for which reason many called co-op the "Antioch Plan".

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