Good internships don’t happen by accident
An internship is one of the most useful tools to prepare college students for careers — and as I described in April, there’s research that proves this.
But it takes more than luck to ensure internships really pay off. Colleges can play a key role in that. Ditto for employers.
Conversations I moderated over the past two weeks, first at the Braven Summit in Chicago and then in a virtual event hosted by the Brookings Institution, drove that home for me.
So what can colleges do? Well for one, they can develop formal internship agreements in which employers pledge to assign meaningful work, report regularly on interns’ progress, and offer mentorship as part of the gig. That approach may not be new, but when I heard Vincent Boudreau, president of the City College of New York, highlight it in Chicago as a practice at his institution, I was eager to follow up with him. The commitment needs to be intentional, he told me later: “Sometimes it requires a little bit of education.”
The commitment also often requires money. City College has been pushing hard to develop more paid internships — and not only to make them more accessible to its many low-income students, who otherwise couldn’t take time away from their jobs (only a quarter of alumni said in a recent survey they’d had an internship, and only 17 percent said they’d had a paid internship). Employer-paid internships, Boudreau said, encourage both students and employers to take the positions more seriously. City College also has some philanthropy-backed internships, like its S Jay Levy Fellowship for Future Leaders. But as Boudreau noted, such programs come with their own costs, for things like finding placement sites and professional development for the selected students.
Another way higher ed can improve internships is by not assuming that all students — especially those who are the first in their family to go to college — understand the potential value of the experience. That was some of the advice I heard during the Brookings event from Aimée Eubanks Davis, the founder and chief executive of Braven (and once a guest on my podcast.)
Colleges need to help students understand what they should be looking for in an internship, she said last week. And part of that help is making sure students truly have the time to explore and apply for internships “as part of their journey through college.”
Like Boudreau, Eubanks Davis also had some advice for employers: Don’t offer the positions as part of the company’s “charity line,” but rather, develop internships as real pathways to hiring.
Is this the dawning of the age of apprenticeships?
A generation ago, the United States was on par with the United Kingdom and Australia in apprenticeships per capita. Today those countries have about eight times as many, and unlike in the United States, the positions aren’t concentrated in the construction trades. What happened? One big difference was that the other countries invested in “an ecosystem of intermediaries” to work alongside employers to create and manage apprenticeships.
Now Apprenticeships for America, a newish nonprofit, has begun to press for the same kind of investment here. With a push from organizations including New America and Strada Education Foundation, you can expect a lot of attention in the next few years on helping community colleges become apprenticeship intermediaries and on promoting apprenticeships as an alternative to traditional higher ed, or as a step for students to consider between high school and college.
And if you’re thinking, Yada yada, all this talk about expanding the number and scope of apprenticeships isn’t new, I don’t disagree. What’s different now is the focus on developing intermediaries to fuel the movement.
The UK and Australia “figured out that employers don’t do it themselves,” said Ryan Craig, co-founder of Apprenticeships for America. The intermediaries make the difference, he said, by taking on many of the costly and time-consuming tasks of a good program, such as developing curricula, recruiting candidates, and ensuring good training and mentorship.
New America’s work on this has already begun, as highlighted in a set of case studies published this week on how some community colleges have developed apprenticeships in fields like nursing and cybersecurity. Also out this week is a new book, Apprentice Nation: How the “Earn and Learn” Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America. And a Strada-funded “road map” from Apprenticeships for America, which will advise community colleges on ways they could become full-fledged intermediaries, is due out in early 2024.
“Apprenticeship is about to have a moment,” said Craig, who is also a private investor, blogger on skills-gap issues, and not so coincidentally, the author of Apprentice Nation.
I’ve known Craig for nearly 25 years and always found him a provocative and thoughtful observer of trends in education and the economy, even as I recognize his own financial interests: Achieve Partners, the venture-capital firm he co-founded, invests in “new models for learning and pathways to economic opportunity.”
In an earlier iteration under the name University Ventures, the firm invested in coding boot camps and other ventures that Craig celebrated as “faster and cheaper alternatives to college.” Five years ago, he was arguing that such models were valuable pathways into the digital economy. When I sat down with him last week to discuss his new book, Craig said that while he still believes in alternatives to college — in part because more entry-level jobs require experience that students may not get from college — he now sees “earn and learn” models as preferable to requiring students to pay for their training.
Achieve Partners has invested in about a dozen “high-intervention” intermediaries of the sort that Craig and Apprenticeships for America are promoting. But the United States could benefit from hundreds more of them, he said — for-profit, nonprofit, government-run. And he argued for more state and federal funding, citing a $1,000-to-$1 imbalance in government support for higher education versus apprenticeships.
I have no idea what the right balance of funding is, but I do find the case for greater investment in apprenticeships compelling. I’ve been fascinated to see how they’re being used to ease teacher shortages, and I love the idea of apprenticeship gap years to help students get a better handle on why they’re going to college. As Craig noted, the traditional approach to higher ed isn’t set up for “changing the sequencing” right now. But it could change.
I’m also eager to see if and how community colleges embrace this opportunity. In his book, Craig dismisses what he calls “paper apprenticeships” at some community colleges and describes them simply as training programs marketed “to convince companies to bite.” An apprenticeship isn’t a curriculum waiting for a customer, he said. It’s a paying job, with training built in.
Still, in so many ways, community colleges are perfectly suited for this intermediary role. Not only do they have the academic expertise and employer connections, they’re also in a position to shape apprenticeships to benefit students. As the New America report notes, institutions can “make apprenticeships credit-bearing or ensure they lead to credentials rather than just immediate employment in jobs that might disappear.” Craig hopes community colleges lean in. Me too.
Correction: In the newsletter two weeks ago about last lessons learned from my return to Fort Lewis College, I misstated the circumstances of a former dean’s departure. The arts and sciences dean left to become president of Western Oregon University. That newsletter has been updated to include the corrected information.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. If you want to follow me on the the site formerly known as Twitter, @GoldieStandard is my handle.
