Benefits of cooperative (co-op) education have been investigated, mainly by surveying students already enrolled in co-op programs. In contrast, this paper investigates prospective students' perceptions of co-op. This was done by analyzing over 33,000 applications to undergraduate engineering programs in a large North American university. Text mining was applied to analyze applicants' responses to the question "Tell us about your reasons for applying". Overall, 58% of students mentioned co-op in their response; this percentage was higher for female applicants, applicants to chemical engineering, domestic students and students applying directly from high school. Based on words frequently occurring in sentences that mentioned co-op, applicants were attracted to co-op programs to learn new skills, gain practical work experience leading to a desirable career, and leverage the reputation and size of the institution's co-op program, with the first two reasons mentioned more often by female applicants and the last by male applicants.