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A century before Taylor Swift, Robert Frost was America’s most famous poet. Hot on the heels of hits like The Road Not Taken and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Frost – cultivating the mien of a plainspoken New England farmer – would tour the Ivy circuit, speaking in lecture halls to adoring, tweed-jacket-wearing, standing-room-only crowds about roads, snow, woods, cows, and poetry. He didn’t care for academic analysis of his poems, which should be heard and felt rather than explained. He also didn’t care for interns.
Frost was often invited to read at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. One summer, a 19-year-old intern from The New Yorker named Truman Capote attended for the first time. The flamboyant future author of In Cold Blood wasn’t a fan of the stoic future poet laureate, letting it be known that he viewed Frost as “a ham” and planned to skip Frost’s reading. The scuttlebutt made its way to the farmer-poet who was furious, prompting the conference director to beg The New Yorker intern to show up. At the reading, depending on who you believe, Capote either pretended to fall asleep or actually fell asleep. The normally even-keeled Frost noticed, stopped reading, threw the book at the slumping Capote, and stormed off the stage, creating a controversy that gave The New Yorker no choice but to end Capote’s internship.
For many interns, it is about the road not taken.
Internships are hot. So a few weeks ago I went to a hot place to understand why. The first conference on internships, Arizona State and McKinsey’s Work-integrated Learning Summit, was held in the spacious VIP club at ASU’s Mountain America Stadium, an appropriate venue since everyone knows Division I college football is a full-time job.
The Summit featured context-setting presentations from ASU hosts and lightning talks from innovative work-based learning solutions. But most of it involved higher education leaders talking to themselves – work-based learning navel gazing – with far too much time spent on:
1. High-minded ideas for a new learning ecosystem with built-in internships;
2. Obstacles to granting credit for work; and
3. The need for more research on whether internships are effective.
My responses:
1. Of course, but how?
2. Nice to have, not must-have.
3. We already know internships are the
single most important determinant of postgraduate employment and career launch – more effective than any classroom-based solution or intervention. Grads with at least one internship are
nearly 50% less likely to be underemployed. In a recent poll,
97% of students found their internship valuable. While focusing internship efforts on research is certainly in higher ed’s comfort zone, that would be analysis paralysis while millions more students graduate into underemployment.
There were a few living, breathing employers at the conference: one panel of executives reciting homilies about starting careers as interns and the importance of hiring interns. But no one addressed the elephant in the room: the enormous shortage of available internships. As expected at a higher ed gathering, what went unstated is that internships are jobs. And that without willing employers, there are no internships.
I was tempted to throw a book across the room. Unlike Robert Frost, I restrained myself.
***
The internship supply shortage is dire. Three years ago, 8.2 million college students wanted internships but only 3.6 million were available and only 2.5 million were quality internships. That means for every student landing a quality internship, two were left out. Why aren’t employers more cooperative? As Tom Monahan, CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, put it to me, “higher education talks about companies as ‘employers’ first, when in fact their primary interest is in delivering goods and services. That businesses employ people to do that work is important, but it’s not their fundamental focus.” The AI corollary to the Monahan maxim is that if companies could employ zero workers, they’d do so in a heartbeat. Their margins and valuations would go through the roof.
Haters gonna hate and companies gonna company. But beyond the direct connection to student economic outcomes, there are plenty of reasons the education and workforce powers-that-be – including every college and university – should shake it off and do whatever they can address the internship shortage:
What can we do? The only foundation solely focused on bridging America’s education-to-employment gap, Strada, is about to release the first survey of companies on workforce needs and internships. I was permitted to preview the report, which has several insights:
The Strada survey confirms what participants at the ASU conference avoided saying out loud: internships are jobs. And like all jobs, they’re only created when companies decide the benefits of hiring outweigh the costs.
***
It’s not clear what education and workforce actors can do on the benefit side short of producing stronger intern candidates; presumably, colleges and universities are already doing their utmost to produce prepared students with strong cognitive and durable skills. And as there are already millions of prepared, skilled candidates who aren’t getting a shot, increasing intern upside isn’t the first lever to pull.
Reducing the downside is. Because for most companies, even if there are no Capotes in the cohort, interns are a major hassle. They require resources to recruit, hire, onboard, train, identify projects that are meaningful but not mission-critical, manage, mentor, provide feedback, and manage risk. Meanwhile, by the time they’ve learned what’s what and gained some measure of productivity, the internship’s over. Plus, there’s no guarantee the good ones will return as full-time employees.
Senior executives may like the idea of interns. Many of them launched their careers as interns, and apparently some attend work-based learning conferences to reminisce. But outside of a handful of elite sectors and firms which have built successful business models fueled by large pools of analysts (i.e., investment banking, management consulting) and where internships are the necessary top-of-funnel, for the managers who actually have to deal with it, launching an internship program and hiring interns makes little business sense. As a result, for the vast majority of companies, interns seem less like a thrilling talent pipeline and more like a resource black hole for training novices who’ll soon go the way of the resources (poof).
Reducing the downside for companies means addressing the operational and financial burden. There are two principal ways to do this: (1) provide financial support; and (2) do the work for them. Which is exactly what’s happening with internship’s older work-based learning cousin, apprenticeship.
With the announcement of the first federal pay-for-performance funding for apprenticeships – $145M starting in July – we have entered a new era of focus on the companies that actually employ work-based learners. Departing from past practice of attempting to pick winners among workforce boards and community colleges (which have never hired a single apprentice), soon, every time an apprentice is hired into a registered program, the company expending the effort will receive public support.
This will make it easier for companies to say yes to apprenticeship and yes to hiring apprentices. Concurrently, the funding will accelerate growth of the ecosystem of apprenticeship intermediaries doing the work of setting up and running apprenticeship programs for companies. As I describe in Apprentice Nation, there are 10 discrete activities companies don’t do but would have to in order to launch apprenticeship programs. Apprenticeship intermediaries perform one or more of these functions to reduce the operational burden for businesses. The most successful ones perform all or nearly all – now including securing new federal funding, thereby paying for the cost of their work – providing turnkey apprenticeship programs for clients.
As pressures mount to ensure every young American receives relevant, paid work experience before graduating into a full-time job search, expect the same evolution with apprenticeship’s younger work-based learning cousin. As companies demand proof that internship makes financial sense, the market is responding with innovative ways of reducing the burden on companies.
Witness Alchemy, which has announced the launch of the first internship service provider. From a base in health sciences clinical placements to over 1,000 providers, Alchemy is planning to scale internships across all sectors – and therefore for students from all programs of study. How will it work? The first ISP will aggregate supply of work-based learners and demand from companies. Alchemy will serve as the employer of record for interns, allowing companies to skip hiring and HR processes, and provide a single AI platform for:
New “co-op in a box” entrants like Alchemy will make it easier for companies to say yes to internships and yes to hiring interns. And just as the emergence of apprenticeship service providers led to pay-for-performance funding for apprenticeships, the emergence of internship service providers should do the same for internships once it’s crystal clear to policymakers that most classroom credentials aren’t worth the paper they’re written on unless combined with relevant work experience.
***
In past generations, young Americans seeking to launch their careers could afford to stop by woods on a snowy evening. They might contemplate the woods and frozen lake, meditate on the sound of the harness bells, confident that the “easy wind” would push them forward on their economic journey. Time off was rarely disqualifying or debilitating. Opportunities abounded as soon as career launchers were ready.
They could even afford a setback on a summer internship. Like Truman Capote, who published his first short story a year after his dismissal and ended up back where he started. The New Yorker bought a number of Capote’s stories, a relationship that culminated in the publication of In Cold Blood, a 4-part series in 1965, more than 20 years after internship interrupted.
Interns learn even when it doesn’t seem like they’re learning. And the experience they gain is now a prerequisite for career launch for young Americans stoic and flamboyant alike. A century after Frost, we need millions more intern jobs. Failure to create them could mean the end of the American Dream: Murder by Death, In Cold Blood. The good news is that there’s a lot education and workforce actors can do to improve ROI for companies and convince them to create these jobs.
Although intern Capote thought it was hammy at the time, Frost had it right:
We have promises to keep
And miles to go before we sleep.