Indentured Internships

Dona Furiosa at Scholastic Snake Oil, 1/8/12:




A community college in which I taught some years ago required all of its students to spend a semester in an internship before graduating. The student's major didn't matter: If he or she wanted to get an Associate's degree from the school, he or she had to perform a semester of unpaid labor that, at least theoretically, related to his or her major.

My department's chair, who was one of the most powerful professors in that college, opposed them and was, in fact, spearheading a campaign to eliminate them. The college president and most of the administration were on the other side of that fence. They argued that internships were an "integral part of the college's unique mission," or some such thing. Guess which side won.

Interestingly, that college required internships from the day it opened its doors, more than three decades before I began teaching there. In those days, the college's student population was mostly white, working-class and male; by the time I was teaching in it, there were two female students for every male and the majority of the students were nonwhite and/or spoke a language other than English at home.

Why is the demographic change relevant? Well, at the time the college opened (in 1970, if I recall correctly), most of those working-class male students were studying trades of one kind or another. The founders of the college argued (correctly, I think) that internships served as short apprenticeships of a kind. In fact, they did lead--or turn in--to some of those students' first jobs.

By the time I started teaching in that college, it had mostly abandoned those vocational programs. A few technical programs remained, but the majority of students were studying liberal arts, as they hoped to transfer to four-year colleges.

Perhaps even more to the point, by my time in the college, most of the students were working to pay for their schooling, and a good number of them were supporting themselves, or families, with their jobs. Such students couldn't afford to take time away from their jobs to do unpaid work--especially when they still had to pay for the credits they'd earn from the internship. My department chair--who had what most people would see as a traditional, even elitist, notion of what higher education should be--argued that expecting students to give up their jobs for unpaid work was unfair as well as impractical.

But there was another good reason for ending the internships which none of the faculty or administrators ever mentioned, but which I learned from my students: Too often, the work they did in those internships bore little or no relationship to any work they would actually do in the careers or occupations for which they were preparing themselves--let alone to the theory they were learning in their classrooms. Many of the students were doing nothing more than stocking or filing, or performing menial labor. One of my students was doing such work for a chain that sold CDs, and it was said to relate to his major, which was audio science.

The worst part of this situation, however, may be that employers in many professions want new graduates/job applicants to have done internships. And, if the student isn't getting practical experience from the internship, what is the employer gaining? Free labor, of course. How many people would volunteer their time to an investment bank, chemical manufacturer, advertising agency or any other large, profitable business? Why should anyone be required to do such a thing?

[...]





.