Harrier named national co-op educator of the year
May 13, 2009
Peggy Harrier, Dean of the Business Technologies Division at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, has been named “Educator of the Year’’ by the Cooperative Education and Internship Association.
The designation – formally known as the Dean Herman Schneider Award -- was made at the CEIA’s annual conference, held this spring in Portland, Ore.
CEIA officials said the award reflects Harrier’s leadership in co-op education at Cincinnati State and with local, regional and national organizations, as well has her record of scholarship in the field.
As acting dean of the Business Technologies Division at Cincinnati State, Harrier supervises 50 full-time faculty and staff and more than 150 adjuncts. She also supervises a mandatory co-op component for 24 business majors that serve more than 2,000 students.
In terms of cooperative education, Cincinnati State has the largest two-year program in the United States and ranks among the top ten of all colleges and universities. Cincinnati State averages more than 3,000 placements a year with over 700 employers. The co-op program is widely regarded as a key reason for the 95 percent placement rate of Cincinnati State graduates.
Harrier is a 1973 graduate of St. Mary’s College and, the following year, of the M.Ed. program at Xavier University. She ran a Montessori school and worked in property management before joining Cincinnati State as an instructor/coordinator in 1984. She is currently a tenured faculty member and acting dean of the Business Technologies Division.
In addition to the CEIA (where she served as national president in 2004-05), Harrier has been active in the Ohio Cooperative Education Association (serving as president 1989-90) and the Midwest Cooperative Education & Internship Association (where she was president from 1996-97).
Cincinnati is the birthplace of the co-op movement. In 1906, Herman Schneider, then a newly-appointed dean of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Engineering, launched the nation’s first co-op program, which augments classroom instruction with paid, real-world experience in the workplace.
