Our Mission

Overcoming underemployment through digital skills and peer connections.

The Challenge

In the last document for earmarks Kalani looked through, we moved past solely focusing on networks to instead look at the entire COOP program. Here's one way we could do that:

Every year, one million first-generation and low-income students graduate from college believing that a bachelor’s degree will provide long-term economic wellbeing for themselves and their families. A shocking number never realize this promise.

Over half of recent graduates are underemployed, working in jobs that don’t require a degree or offer commensurate salaries. For three in four of those graduates, underemployment becomes a trap they cannot escape: they will continue to earn significantly less than their peers for at least the next decade.

The burden falls heaviest on those with the greatest financial stakes: Pell Grant recipients are 31% more likely than non-Pell graduates to be underemployed four years after college. 

Research shows that targeted interventions focused on skills training, access to professional networks, and securing a first full-time job are among the strongest drivers of economic mobility, increasing lifetime income by up to 24%. 

Yet higher education has historically lacked the mandate, funding, and methods to deliver this kind of career-focused support, despite the outsized consequences for the very students public aid is meant to serve.

At COOP, our mission is to mend that promise with the relationships, mentors, and opportunities that connect them to their first good job and set them on a path toward long-term economic mobility.

Our Solution

Graph with our solution including near-peer connections, alumni coaches, and focus on full-time jobs. COOP's social-capital program: Peer connections for economic mobility. Alumni coaches, skills, and networks for good jobs.

COOP Careers was founded in 2014 to fill this gap by delivering a structured fellowship for first-generation and low-income college graduates facing unemployment and underemployment.

Our flagship program is an intensive, 16-week, hybrid fellowship currently offered in three career tracks (Data Analytics, Digital Marketing, and Financial Services) designed to move fellows into stable, career-track roles.

Fellows meet most weeknight evenings in cohorts of 20 led by trained alumni coaches who serve as instructors, mentors, and near-peer role models. Over 16 weeks, cohorts build specialized technical skills, complete hands-on projects, strengthen professional competencies, expand their networks, and pursue competitive full-time positions.

After the initial fellowship, participants enter a structured job search phase lasting two to eight months, when most secure their first offer.

Our Fellowship for underemployed graduates has produced compelling wage outcomes for thousands of first-generation and Pell recipient graduates. Within 12 months of program completion, COOP alumni are 2.3x more likely to find college-level roles, earning more than $50,000 on average and nearly $75,000 within five years.

Most build careers in technology, media, and finance, supported by COOP's active relationships with our employer partners including Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, TikTok, Barclays, and leading advertising agencies.

Today, COOP operates in five major metropolitan areas (New York City, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami) and has supported more than 10,000 recent grads on their journey from underemployment to upward mobility.

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