Just because a college does not require co-ops does not mean that you cannot seek a summer job in your field and/or take a semester leave to work. It is very common for engineers to gain work experience during school, even at schools where it is not required for graduation.
This is a bit of a tangent from comparing co-op versus non-co-op, but one measure of a college’s worth is “how much money are they spending on educating you?” (With financial aid and endowments, this is not the same as “how much money are you paying?”). I’ve been fascinated by pulling this info out of IPEDS for my daughter’s college list after seeing this lecture:
http://nber.org/feldstein_lecture_2016/feldsteinlecture_2016.html