I n early 2017, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin introduced the idea of requiring an internship or “hands-on work experience” to obtain a bachelor’s degree in the 26-campus University of Wisconsin system. This was an unsurprising development for many of us in Wisconsin. For the past several years, the governor has championed the view that a “skills gap” was stifling the state’s economy, primarily because, he has said, the higher-education system was out of touch with the needs of the business community.
Although that proposal did not make it into the state’s 2017-19 biennial budget, Governor Walker was hardly alone in advocating for mandatory internships. Citing statistics that former interns are twice as likely to get a good job upon graduation as other students are, researchers at Gallup recently argued that all colleges should make internships a requirement. In fact, Seton Hall University and California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, among many other colleges and departments, already require an internship to graduate.
Given that 65 percent of employers want applicants with industry-specific work experience, and millions of students are struggling to pay for basic needs and the rising price of tuition, anything that would increase a college student’s job prospects is a good thing, right?
Well, no. As a researcher who studies college-workplace transitions, I’ve concluded that a senior administrator at a Wisconsin technical college had it right when she told me that “internships are the Wild West in higher education.”
In many colleges, the landscape of internships is best characterized as ambiguous, unregulated, potentially exploitative, and — for many students — inaccessible.
Here’s what we need to do before mandatory internships should be considered:
- Pay interns.
Debates about the merits and ethical considerations of paid versus unpaid internships have raged for decades. Lawsuits filed against employers that assigned unpaid interns to menial janitorial duties, billable hours in law firms, or skilled work on film sets have caught the attention of federal regulators and the media.
At the heart of the distinction between paid and unpaid internships is the question of who derives more material advantage from the internship — the student or the employer. If the employer benefited materially from the internship, then the student must be considered an employee, with the compensation and rights conferred to them under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
However, the Trump administration recently relaxed that provision, prompting a lawyer who represents employers to observe, “This standard that the department is setting forth is easier for companies to satisfy in terms of internships qualifying as unpaid.”
That is troubling, because research conducted by the National Association for College and Employers found that 40 percent of college internships were unpaid, and a study at the University of Georgia found that unpaid internships correlated negatively with salary and employment outcomes.
This means that thousands of students are not reaping the supposed benefits of an internship experience, while also going unprotected by federal law regarding discrimination and harassment. In this era of increasingly normalized racist rhetoric and evidence of sexual harassment in the workplace, that reality should alarm higher-education professionals.
Making internships mandatory for graduation could also flood local labor markets with students, many of whom would be willing to work for no pay. Besides increasing the risk of student exploitation, such a move would very likely depress wages for full-time workers, including recent college graduates.
Worse yet, for the millions of college students struggling with food insecurity, homelessness, and rising tuition costs, an unpaid internship — some of which actually require paid tuition to receive credits — is untenable and could lead to their leaving college.
- Guarantee a critical mass of qualified, willing employers.
One of the biggest problems with mandatory internships is whether adequate jobs exist for 20 million college students. Where are all of these students going to find an internship?
This issue is especially problematic for rural institutions in economically depressed areas, and for disciplines that lack direct and obvious connections to employers. On a recent trip to a small college in rural South Carolina, I found that outside of national chains like Walmart and Walgreens, students have only two main options for internships — a manufacturing company and a hospital — and they offered few opportunities for students outside of engineering and health-care programs.
The bigger question is whether organizations are prepared and qualified to host interns. Research demonstrates that effective mentoring, job-site task quality, productive feedback, and coordination with academic programs are crucial to student satisfaction and positive employment outcomes.
But providing such mentorship and integrating students into the daily operations of an organization is no small task. Many businesses are unable or unwilling to provide students with high-quality mentoring or to give them meaningful tasks.
Finding an internship that is strongly related to a degree program also has implications for students’ employability. Forty percent of associate-degree holders who had internships closely related to their degrees had jobs immediately upon graduating, while only 16 percent of those with internships outside of their disciplines had jobs waiting for them.
- Provide adequate resources to support internship programs.
Running a high-quality program takes a number of experienced employees who can advise students, find appropriate placements, coordinate with employers, and troubleshoot problems. For instance, it takes a full-time career-services director, three employer-relations coordinators, and five part-time advisers to run the internship program for the 2,550 undergraduates in the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s business school.
For cash-strapped colleges, many of which may not have adequately resourced career centers, it is fantasy to to be able to design a mandatory internship program for all students. A poorly planned and underfunded effort to find placements for thousands of desperate students would risk their well-being, stress local labor markets, and ruin what began as an excellent idea.
A s a scientist of learning, I recognize the value of experiential education and agree that theory-driven education must be paired with hands-on, inquiry-driven learning. The social and cultural capital that students can gain from an internship can be valuable, especially for low-income or first-generation students, who may lack both.
But right now, our higher-education system is unprepared to take on internships for all students. The research literature on internships is also weaker than you’d expect, with no standardized definition, and studies scattered across countries and disciplines. This is why our new Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions, at UW-Madison, is starting a research program to document the effects of internship-program design features on student outcomes.
Until we have more evidence and adequate resources in hand, let’s hit the pause button on internship mania, and take the time to carefully design and support a system that protects students while making available rich experiential-learning opportunities for all.
Matthew T. Hora, an assistant professor of adult and higher education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is the author of Beyond the Skills Gap: Preparing College Students For Life and Work (2016, Harvard Education Press).
