Suppose company A has a co-op job involving unglamorous but technically meaningful work and offers decent pay. Company B has a job involving glamorous work tha

Suppose company A has a co-op job involving unglamorous but technically meaningful work and offers decent pay. Company B has a job involving glamorous work that may or may not be interesting, but expects you to work for free. What motivates the available worker pool? Worker A has real skills to bring to the table and expects to be paid for them, so he/she goes for company A. Worker B's competence is lacking, but glamorous company B would really help his/her resume, so that's where they go (they probably wouldn't pass the interview at company A either). I used to be a co-op student at the University of Waterloo. Back then, it was possible to pay your way through school on just co-op earnings. Companies did real interviews for co-op jobs - you had to earn those spots. Of course the students would also feel out the companies. Some were just dead end jobs doing maintenance on a long-obsolete piece of software, that sort of thing. Others were cool. A significant oddity was a certain really big company with three letters and (then) 300K+ employees, that sent generic recruiters doing generic recruiting (but they were good at it). Here you really were just "generic co-op student, we'll assign you something suitable". I had a strange but ultimately very memorable first co-op job there (OK - doing APL programming in a marketing group - strange enough?) For second and later co-op jobs you could secure something interesting internally before going back to school.