Essay:The need for student cooperatives

Student cooperatives may be able to bridge the conceptual impasse between worker cooperatives and consumer cooperatives. Such cooperative institutions as student cooperatives remove the association between cooperatives and economic roles by centering on the necessity of continual education and research as a precursor to economic roles.

In other words, the distinction between a worker who is both employed and co-owning of sales and profits within the cooperative and a consumer who is employed outside the cooperative in which s/he is co-owning of sales and profits is blurred by the fact that, in order to qualify for employment within or without the cooperative in which they are member-owners, they must first be educated in the skills of the trades for which they're employed. When their own jobs are obsoleted by technology or are outsourced to cheaper labor in other, poorer countries, the affected workers are compelled by circumstances and advertising to "go back to school" to learn newer, more popular skills to maintain their own incomes.

• Hence, if workers and consumers are both ultimately compelled to become perpetual students of the most recently-demanded trades and expertises in order to sustain their incomes and lifestyles, then why not rename consumer cooperatives as student cooperatives to reflect this fact?
• If one is never too old or too far gone to learn, then why not make educational resources freely and perpetually accessible and available to all workers and consumers?
• Why not encourage the flourishing of business and employment co-operatives from within student initiatives, so as to envelop an entire cycle of economic activity within the cooperative and its subsidiaries?

Providing this common basis for cooperation and sharing of skills and profit should be the domain and operation of student cooperatives, which have the potential of holding larger memberships than consumer cooperatives and providing more recently-skilled workforces than worker cooperatives. They can move the cooperative model somewhat away from the seeking of profit and sales to the seeking of knowledge, skills and cognition, as profits are distributed to all student members (including workers) in order to further the learning capacity and capability of the entire student body, much of which ultimately serves as the future potential democratic workforce of the cooperative.