For generations, college students have faced the same frustrating paradox: You need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience. Internships have long been heralded as the solution to this Catch-22, but the numbers tell a different story.
More than eight million American college students seek internships each year, while only 3.6 million land one. When college students cannot find internships or other opportunities that combine education and work, it threatens to flatten their career trajectory.
Today, more than half of bachelor’s degree graduates are underemployed one year after graduating. A decade later, 45% remain in jobs that don’t require a college degree.
Higher education traditionally has leaned heavily on a familiar playbook to connect students with employers. They have used career fairs, advisory boards, mentorship programs, and occasional class projects because a professor happens to know someone at a local company.
While well-intended, these approaches leave most students behind. Not every student has the luxury, connections or time to figure out how to gain work experience while they’re in college. Not every employer can provide the structure, support, and supervision for a quality internship program.
When getting an education and getting a job are seen as separate pursuits, higher education struggles to give every student the opportunity to gain real-world experience early and often along their education pathway.
Despite the power of internships—Gallup and Purdue found that students who complete them are 1.8 times more likely to be engaged at work after graduation—only 41% of students complete them overall. That drops to 27% among students who are the first in their family to go to college.
Alternatives to an internship
Preparing students for the world of work isn’t about simply placing them in a job. It’s about incorporating career readiness throughout their educational journey.
Solving this challenge doesn’t require colleges to spend massive amounts of new resources or reinvent the wheel. To unclog the internship bottleneck and close the career divide, institutions should rethink how they embed work into their student experience.
Instead of treating employer engagement as a one-off event, institutions should be making real-world experiential learning a core part of every student’s education. That also means looking beyond the campus to cultivate stronger partnerships with employers, local governments, and community organizations that employ an institution’s graduates.
One logical place to start is by venturing further upstream and embedding work opportunities directly into classroom instruction. These real-time real-world opportunities can take the form of projects commissioned by employers and supervised by faculty.
Whether these projects take an entire semester or just a couple of weeks, project-based opportunities built into the curriculum allow the work to happen in the classroom. That means students don’t have to take time away from class to complete them.
Connecting learning to work experience can help students build the confidence, skills and professional connections and gain experience that can help them get a job. Students overwhelmingly agree that greater exposure to work experience would be a boon to their class engagement and career prospects.
A recent survey revealed that more than 80% of college students want their professors to incorporate more real-world experience into their courses, yet only 30% of institutions offer project-based opportunities in their classes. Likewise, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that only 39% of students have completed a career-related class project.
Work-embedded learning can be good for business. Employers can gain access to fresh insights when they guide and give feedback to college students during the project process.
And as the United States grapples with a massive shortage of workers, project-based learning enables companies to build their brands and tap into talent pipelines without the heavy lift of a traditional internship program.
How to create inspiring spaces
National University in California integrates work-based learning experiences into the curriculum that connect students to real-world company projects. These project-based opportunities, often part of student capstone projects required to earn their degree, provide both academic credit and hands-on experience that allows students to build skills and knowledge in their chosen field of study.
Since this program launched in 2021, more than 30 National University faculty have used this program to integrate into their courses dozens of projects related to cybersecurity, data science, health care, engineering and other competitive fields.
Facilitating tighter collaboration with employers is only the first step. Successful work-integrated learning relies on building the right relationships, providing the right events and programming in inspiring spaces to support these projects, and reorganizing teams to support work-integrated learning.
Building corporate partnerships that can sustain over the long haul requires a deeper commitment to breaking down internal silos across functions on campus.
Faculty, career services, alumni, and academic staff should collaborate as equal partners with employers and each other to prepare students for their careers after graduation. Institutions also can create media labs, makerspaces and other spaces that facilitate student work and collaboration so students can work on projects and practice presentations.
Dedicated on-campus spaces can also accommodate visitors and collaborators from outside companies. An outstanding example of this model is the iZone, a creative, collaborative problem-solving space inside the campus library at the University of Rochester in New York.
Staffed primarily by students with supervision from full-time staff, the iZone offers workspaces for teams and a presentation space and exhibition areas that host visitors. It provides workshops and services so students can devise and develop projects with community, cultural and economic impact.
The image above was created by AI.
