This can be very school dependent so OP definitely is on the right track for trying to dig down.
Gatekeeping build clubs was one of the red flags for my daughter and one of the criteria she used to cull her college list. And there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to which schools had open access and which had a competitive process.
Agree 100%!! My son cut some schools from his list because teams were too exclusive or cliquey. This was actually a column on his college spreadsheet. 
But some of the very top teams are open access. So I agree, there is no rhyme or reason and you just have to meet them and find out more.
Agree on this..
my former employer used to have a huge northeastern coop program and for a hot minute I was liaison to northeasterns coop program at another company (neither engineering specific ). At both we had a deep relationship with school and NEU proactive sent us amazing students as we knew we were so good to them! It was great and student were amazing. I hear most of those deep ongoing partnerships are gone now, however. Neither company host coops any ore. I’m still in touch with many of the coops we hired and they said lovely things about NEU,
I just know what I hear today from current parents and very recent grads is very different than 10, 15 years ago though - coops are hard to find, and school is more bureaucratic from what I am hearing …
That’s sad to hear!
My D26 is doing a summer engineering internship at a subsidiary of a publicly traded company. They need more interns but they only advertise through word of mouth.
There are opportunties - but oftentimes you have to be connected or have a network.
I agree, honestly! And this is just one person’s opinion and what I am hearing in my circles, etc.. I am the first to say that. Surely many people still love it and they have absolute hoards applying. My two cents are they have concentrated VERY successfully on growing their prestige/ranking and their reputation nationally 30 years, and in the last 15 years have REALLY upped their expansion game (it is impressive!) …I think, personally, they have lost some co-op focus with SO many kids graduating in 4 years, and lost some of the connecting to employers in a way more deeply and in a way different than other schools… For engineering, lots of schools let students do 6-month co-ops if they want and/or are encouraged to do so (WPI, Case, RIT (it is literally a grad requirement there to do 2 long ones), Drexel, that I know off the top of my head).
I wonder if co-OP’s are disappearing as the result of increasing pressure to pay students working in a co-ops in the past 10-15 years. In addition, the current economic downturn is adding financial pressure on employers. Finally, AI can do many of the tasks that in the past were assigned to co-op students.
That is not our experience. When my D was a student at Purdue, about 1/3 of the CoE did a co-op. It’s now up 80% just a few years later.
And I don’t understand your comment about AI doing many of that tasks assigned to co-op students. That is not true at all for engineering co-op tasks.