Cooperative Education

Cooperatives are not a silver bullet, but through member co-ownership and co-governance, they foster skills and culture that build more robust practices of local democracy. Cooperative education is therefore foundational for a more inclusive future. Building democracy requires teaching democracy, and ensuring that all people have access to the lessons of past experience in running democratic economies.

The exclusion of cooperative curriculum from formal business schools around the world pushes the cooperative sector to the sidelines. Of the 30 most prominent business management textbooks, only three mention co-ops, all in negative or neutral light. In some ways, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Most business schools are largely funded by wealthy alumni and multinational corporations, who don’t stand to benefit from the growth of the cooperative sector.

It wasn’t always this way. Before World War II, cooperatives were commonly found in textbooks. In the United States, the Department of Agriculture helped to establish centers to support cooperative development at state colleges, and such centers still exist at Cornell University, the University of Missouri, the University of Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Even Stanford University was founded in part on the premise of advancing education about cooperative economics, although this wish of its founder has been mainly ignored.

To address the lack of cooperative education, Saint Mary’s Business School launched the first cooperative business program in North America. Approved in 2002, Saint Mary’s Masters of Business Administration (MBA) allows students to enter business education through a cooperative lens, gaining fluency in mainstream business content while simultaneously critiquing it and cultivating an ability to build and run alternatives.

Full-fledged university programs in cooperative business are new to North America, but they draw inspiration from a global network of co-op educators. Kenya, India, and the Canadian province of Quebec all boast meaningful co-op sectors backed by formal cooperative education in universities. As a growing movement, new voices are helping to evolve and mature the field of cooperative education. Cooperative education can look different in different settings. Many universities in the United States still offer a cooperative center within a business school or a certification program that allows students to learn strategies for cooperative workplaces and collaborate with local co-ops. Some schools, like EdVisions Cooperatives and the Friends Institute, are run as cooperatives. Other organizations, like the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, offer children’s summer camps that teach cooperative leadership skills.

Cooperative education is also happening through efforts to form or reorganize universities as cooperatives. Operating a university as a cooperative allows students to live and experience values of democracy and civil participation, and, in this way, contribute to one of the purposes of higher education. Cooperative universities recast students and faculty as active participants in democracy, increase their personal investment in the institution, and challenge the modern university’s profit motive. Mondragon University, for example, operates as a workers’ cooperative. Students earn their tuition through working within co-op businesses within the university, which together enable the university to operate, while faculty invest in the university and receive surplus funds as a salary.

In addition to fostering social and economic democracy, cooperative education matters for a variety of practical reasons. One example is accounting. Traditional accounting systems are built to help managers and owners track, manage, and maximize profits for shareholders. But cooperatives serve the needs of their communities and are expected to balance financial sustainability with other goals like job creation, access to quality goods and services, and ecological restoration. Without protocols to track these broader goals, narrow systems for capitalist accounting can easily distort the core intentions of a coop. An unfortunate trap is that the MBA graduate with the wrong accounting tools can destroy the culture and value of a cooperative because they aren’t tracking and accounting for the right things.

The field of marketing is also an evolving discipline within cooperative education. Investor-driven businesses are structured to “buy low and sell high,” using cheap materials and labor and selling at the highest prices that customers will pay (voluntarily or not). At the same time, mainstream marketing trains consumers to connect personal identity and value to the things they buy, while ignoring harm to workers, the environment, or even to themselves. This kind of marketing doesn’t make sense for the co-op sector. If you’re part of a community-owned grocery store, what does marketing look like? Do you mimic traditional grocery stores that place candy at children’s eye-level so parents can’t check out without a fight? How might marketing for cooperatives create healthier and more responsible consumer patterns while ensuring customer loyalty and sales? Marketing and accounting, along with new approaches to human resources and governance, are among the most exciting innovations that cooperative education can bring to the private sector.

While Saint Mary’s University’s MBA program has now gained international recognition and attracted students from several countries, it faced notable challenges as the first program of its kind. It took years to secure a student pipeline to meet the school’s financial needs. The sector faces a vicious cycle: without co-ops, cooperative MBA programs struggle for viability. And without formal cooperative education, co-ops struggle to reach scale and market-share.

As the viability of formal cooperative education depends on market and regulatory conditions, the broadest task ahead is to inspire public belief and demand in a vision for a cooperative, just, and democratic economy.