There Aren’t Enough Internships to Go Around

Many college students have been told that an internship can help them explore a potential career, refine their skills and secure employment after graduation. But the supply of available internships in the U.S. isn’t keeping pace with demand.

Of the 8.2 million students who wanted to intern in 2023, close to half—4.6 million—didn’t end up participating, according to a new report from the Business–Higher Education Forum (BHEF). Students of color, along with first-generation, low-income and community college students, had an especially hard time landing an internship.

But getting an internship doesn’t guarantee students the experience they’re looking for, either. Of the 3.6 million students who completed an internship, only 2.5 million enjoyed a “higher-quality” experience, meaning they consistently received different elements of a structured, skills-based endeavor, according to the report.

“Students, institutions, policymakers and employers are all saying we need more of these opportunities,” said Kristen Fox, CEO of BHEF, who added that at least 12 states offer businesses financial incentives to provide internships. “But as we look at how our ecosystem exists and operates today, we aren’t set up to produce those opportunities.”

While the barriers to participating in an internship that students face—such as low pay and difficulty balancing its demands with college courses, work or childcare—are well documented, the obstacles preventing employers from offering more high-quality internships aren’t as clear.

“There’s so much data on internships and workforce learning, but it’s all focused either on the learner perspective or the institutional perspective,” said Jennifer Thornton, BHEF’s senior vice president and chief programs officer and co-author of the report. “You can’t increase opportunities or improve equity in internships if you don’t know anything about the employer perspective.”

To gain more insight into why businesses don’t offer more quality internships, researchers surveyed nearly 2,700 employers last spring and conducted interviews with 28 different employers.

They found that nearly half (48 percent) cited operational challenges— including recruitment, finding appropriate tasks for interns, having adequate staff to supervise them and getting support for the programs from top executives—as barriers to offering more quality internships. Twenty-six percent of respondents said concerns about economic uncertainty made them hesitant to bring on new staff. Employers also indicated that the type of assistance they most need are subsidies to cover intern wages and program costs.

Another 18 percent of employers said the biggest barriers to offering quality internships at scale were questions about how to design the positions, including how to comply with labor laws and college credit requirements and how to structure the internship. Creating clearer definitions of internship formats and structures as well as the type of student they’re serving—a college sophomore likely has different goals for an internship than a career changer, for instance—can help “build out that ecosystem of different types of experiential learning to create a system in which there’s opportunities for all,” Fox said. But “that requires collaboration and coordination” across higher education institutions, policy makers and industry.

Additionally, 87 percent of employers said they hired at least one of their interns through an informal channel, such as a professional connection, direct outreach from a student or a recommendation from a friend or family member, the report noted.

Mounting recognition of that ad hoc approach to hiring interns has led to “growing efforts to systematize the internship placement process,” said Charlotte Cahill, associate vice president of education for Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit focused on the intersection of education and the workforce. “There are lots of challenges within those efforts, including not just a lack of internship but also a lack of system-level capacity.”

She added that at many colleges, faculty members often use their own personal and industry connections to help some of their students secure internships. If that faculty member leaves, it can create a loss of internship opportunities.

The BHEF report recommends various approaches industry and higher education representatives can deploy to increase the availability of quality internships, including using full-service intermediary groups—such as consortium of colleges, a local chamber of commerce or a national industry association—to help manage internship operations.

Although they have the potential to fill that gap, “trying to use intermediaries to scale internship opportunities is a really expensive proposition,” said Cahill, adding that intermediaries often struggle to maintain reliable funding streams. “It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, but it does mean we need to think carefully about potential funding sources for doing it.”

The report also recommends expanding and testing different internship models that align with the needs of specific employers and learners, as well as developing industry-recognized, data-driven elements of quality internships.

Regardless of how it happens, creating more internships will allow businesses to grow their pipeline of early-career skilled workers to help offset the effects of an aging population and worker retirements, said Nicole Smith, an economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce

“One of the reasons businesses may be reluctant [to create internships] is they see it as onerous and a huge amount of investment,” Smith said. “What we have to do is create connections between institutions of higher learning and businesses, and allow businesses the opportunity to influence curriculum development so that transition is much more smooth.”