UW alumnus here, IMO the PEY makes very little sense to both the student and employer. From the employer side, you're committing yourself to 18 months of full-time employment for someone who is an unknown value - I've heard this from multiple employers that the four-month terms are more attractive, since it's not nearly as damaging to make a bad hire. Worst case scenario you let the kid sit around and twiddle their thumbs for the last month or two. Long terms lead to more conservative hiring, leading to less placements overall.
From the student side, co-op isn't just about learning how it is to work in-industry, but also to gain a breadth of experiences and find out where you want to be (or more cynically, where you stand a chance). I had 6 co-op terms spread over 5 companies, and it's been a huge career accelerant - I started off working at a no-name code shop, which paved the way to a brand-name code shop, which convinced someone at a highly algorithmic code shop to take me on for 4 months, and that finally got the Big Boys (Goog, Facebook, Amazon, MSFT, etc) to take me seriously enough to hire me. I simply could not have achieved the end result after graduation if I was limited to only a single co-op term.
The way I see it, UW's co-op system takes your first few years of ladder climbing and compresses that into, well, almost no time at all. I've been able to bypass a great deal of the drudge work right off the bat simply by having good names and solid reviews on my record.
From the student side, co-op isn't just about learning how it is to work in-industry, but also to gain a breadth of experiences and find out where you want to be (or more cynically, where you stand a chance). I had 6 co-op terms spread over 5 companies, and it's been a huge career accelerant - I started off working at a no-name code shop, which paved the way to a brand-name code shop, which convinced someone at a highly algorithmic code shop to take me on for 4 months, and that finally got the Big Boys (Goog, Facebook, Amazon, MSFT, etc) to take me seriously enough to hire me. I simply could not have achieved the end result after graduation if I was limited to only a single co-op term.
The way I see it, UW's co-op system takes your first few years of ladder climbing and compresses that into, well, almost no time at all. I've been able to bypass a great deal of the drudge work right off the bat simply by having good names and solid reviews on my record.