This country was built by unpaid interns. And in exchange, I assume they got college credit.
—Stephen Colbert
Along with the decisive intervention of the FLSA, it was the rise of mandatory schooling and the outcry of educators that ultimately overcame exploitative child labor in the U.S. That makes it all the more surprising—and all the more disturbing—that schools are now lending their moral and intellectual authority to illegal and unethical labor arrangements involving their own students. We’ve already seen how dozens of schools provide a dubious academic cover for Disney’s menial, minimum-wage internships, but the systematic complicity of the Academy goes much deeper. An overwhelming majority of colleges and universities, as well as some high schools, endorse and promote unpaid internships without a second thought, provide the lucrative academic credit that employers wishfully hope will indemnify their firms, and justify it all with high-minded rhetoric about “situated learning” and “experiential education.” Meanwhile, the internship frenzy among students and their families resembles nothing so much as the escalating competition surrounding undergraduate and graduate admissions—for which internship credentials are often considered a valuable asset.
Somehow a convenient myth has been making the rounds that interns earning academic credit fall outside the FLSA. A significant percentage of employers using unpaid interns now hide behind this urban legend, requiring their interns to be enrolled in college and to submit proof of the credit received for an internship. “To shift liability back on to the university, if something were to happen, is ultimately their goal,” one career counselor told me. Employers claiming to offer academic credit instead of pay, as if it were some generous boon to the intern, are being cynical and disingenuous. As the director of career services at UCLA told The Chronicle of Higher Education, “What [employers are] saying is holding the institution hostage … It’s really not their call whether their experience is creditworthy.”1 If an internship is properly structured, such that a faculty member would gladly serve as an advisor on the academic end, then that employer has simply met the minimum conditions necessary to not pay their interns. Nor are glowing promises of skills training and mentoring are enough—what counts in terms of legality is the day-to-day reality, not the way a position is marketed.
“A student still has the right to sue under the FLSA even if academic credit is being awarded,” writes employment lawyer Donald T. O’Connor. (O’Connor and other lawyers also dismiss the myth that unpaid interns can sign away their right to payment in a contract—they cannot.)2 Deanne Amaden, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Labor, has confirmed in no uncertain terms that credit is no panacea: “Academic credit alone does not guarantee that the employer is in compliance with the six criteria of the Fair Labor Standards Act.”
A 2010 fact sheet from the Wage and Hour Division clarifies how academic credit is taken into account: “In general, the more an internship program is structured around a classroom or academic experience as opposed to the employer’s actual operations, the more likely the internship will be viewed as an extension of the individual’s educational experience (this often occurs where a college or university exercises oversight over the internship program and provides educational credit).” In other words, credit is seen as useful evidence, among other forms of evidence, that militates in favor of an intern being considered a trainee who need not be paid—but credit is far from being the single, decisive factor. Yet many employers still buy into the myth that academic credit provides a blanket legal and ethical sanction for their all-work, no-pay internships, while the real test remains centered on the six overlooked Supreme Court criteria.
The upshot is that illegal internships have become even more unfair and burdensome, as employers require not only that their charges work for free, but that they also obtain credit, which usually means paying to work. Colleges and universities have allowed the academic credit myth to spread in part because these credits, closely linked to tuition, now form a significant revenue stream at many institutions. “It’s a dirty little secret” that internships represent “a very cheap way to provide credits … cynically, a budget balance” for universities, says Gina Neff, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied communications internships. Phil Gardner at Michigan State agrees: “There’s much more money coming from these internship credits than [there is] going into sustained internship programs for these people.” Neff mentions the example of a small PR firm where many of her students have worked: “I read the reports of what students do at this firm and it makes me cry. Here the students are paying good money—paying for four or five credits a quarter to work for this group—and they’re being told to stuff envelopes or pass out flyers on the street. It’s lawbreaking—it’s not what an internship’s supposed to be—and unfortunately there are a lot of those out there.”
For graduates and older people seeking internships, the requirement of college credit for many positions is a bitter complaint for a separate reason: arguably, it represents discrimination on the basis of one’s matriculation status. “A lot of the job lists that go around are all unpaid internships and offer the college credit option,” one unpaid intern told me. “Paying to work for free highlights how twisted the labor market has become, but since I’m not in college anymore, I can’t even apply for most internships.”
In certain cases, paying college tuition to work for free can be justified—particularly if the school plays a central role in securing the internship and makes it a serious, substantive academic experience. Providing credit certainly can cost the school in terms of supervision time and administrative work, although the costs are unlikely to match those of a classroom experience. And in the most miserable, increasingly common scenario, employers use the credits in an attempt to legitimize illegal internships while universities charge for them and provide little in return, and interns are simply stuck running after them, paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of working for free. “It’s insane,” says David Gregory, a law professor who has written on illegal internships, adding that the widespread abuse of academic credit has barely registered so far as an issue up in the ivory tower. Gregory has written that “schools are not merely complicit in this exploitation; they often affirmatively urge students to take the path of the unpaid internship for dubious academic credit.”3
Take Michael Feldman, who paid NYU $1,600 to take an unpaid internship on The Daily Show that required academic credit. A recent graduate, Feldman made a deal with the university that, in return for his payment, they would issue the minimum credit he needed to take on the internship. Ali Wiezbowski, a communications major at the University of Pennsylvania, had to shell out $2,800 to the university for a one-credit online “Communication Internship Seminar”—a thin educational veneer required by her internship at NBC Universal. Such examples are multiplying. Employers get free labor, thinking that they can hide their practices behind a registrar’s stamp, and schools earn a nice chunk of change. Everybody wins except interns and their families, and those who can’t afford to play the game. And it is well established that most students pay for the credit themselves (71 percent, according to an Intern Bridge report).
Schools should at least evaluate the legality of an internship—with particular scrutiny for unpaid situations—before publicizing it to their students and thus lending it their stamp of approval. Instead, employing staff whose role is typically to boost internships at all costs, universities are falling all over themselves to outsource their students’ education and lend credibility to illegal employment practices. In a survey of 713 colleges, 95 percent reported that they allow unpaid internships to be posted on college campuses and websites, though a few added that they exclude unpaid positions at for-profit companies. In the same survey, only 27.6 percent of the colleges required classroom experience in granting academic credit for an internship. Even if there is no conspiracy to boost school revenues by channeling more students into for-credit internships, the conflict of interest is straightforward: colleges seek to perpetuate and control a system that benefits them.4
Henry, Linda, and countless other interns have trusted their schools to connect them to legitimate, educational internships, finding their positions through their college career centers. These offices—many of them employing full-time internship advisors and claiming to offer exhaustive resources—are far too often silent on questions of legality. Career offices provide little considered counsel to students about avoiding unpaid gofer work that masquerades as a career opportunity or a learning experience. For all the breathless advice on the career services websites of colleges and universities—“Create your own internship!” “Enhance your marketability!”—the issue of pay is usually treated obliquely, the law relating to internships rarely mentioned. At best, career offices are taking an agnostic approach to illegal internships, letting students decide for themselves; at worst, they are failing to prevent and even facilitating their own students’ exploitation, publicizing and supporting illegal employer bids for cheap labor.
Claiming that they lack the capacity, most career centers make no attempt to weed out illegal opportunities peddled on their websites or at their internship fairs—this reluctance seems to be particularly acute if the employer is locally or nationally respected, or maintains a cozy relationship with schools à la Disney. Yet given the statements made by the Department of Labor, how can colleges continue to post unpaid, forprofit internships without questioning them? Lately, there is a better chance that a posting for an illegal, exploitative internship will be flagged on Craiglist than on most university websites.
In fairness to Career Services personnel, many students clamor for the credits when prized internships are at stake and the bill is going straight to their parents, to whom it is often indistinguishable from tuition fees for classes. When credit is refused for whatever reason (by an individual professor or department, or because of university policy), career counselors are caught between demanding employers and interns, and they scramble to make accommodations. “We do workarounds where we help them connect with a community college to get work-study credit,” one university career counselor told me. Some have recognized the cost to students of paying for regular academic credits while they work for free—and are trying to craft sensible, affordable solutions. More and more career offices now issue vague letters of support for an intern to show their employer, offer the option of an official “internship transcript notation” (for a fee, usually) or produce special “internship certificates,” while still others have crafted a magical “zero-credit” option. In such cases, no actual credits representing substantive education actually change hands. Although thoughtful, and increasingly popular, these strange fixes get further and further from the point, and still don’t absolve employers of their legal (not to mention ethical) responsibilities.
Of course, professors sometimes intervene with their own academic and intellectual standards—many principled economists are unwilling to vouch for a shady viral marketing internship as a form of training in economics—and very occasionally the school-based component of an internship can be as rigorous and valuable as any class. Smaller and lesserknown colleges, desperate to prove the value of their degrees, are more likely to bend academic standards to meet employer requests. Elite universities often jealously guard the value of their credit, withholding it from internships just as from other academic programs they deem unworthy.
The occasional principled stance throws common practice into even starker relief. James Hughes, an economics professor at Bates College, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that his department has rejected dozens of requests from students, parents, and employers to supply credits for unpaid internships, mainly in finance. “We’re quite adamant about our refusal to play along,” says Hughes. “Why is it that we have to evaluate this experience, just so some multibillion-dollar bank can avoid paying $7.50 an hour?”5
Education at its most confused and commodified, the ivory tower weighed up and sold by the pound—this is the state of academic credit at many institutions. Anya Kamenetz calls it “a unique currency that is presumed to confer culture, reason, respect … that you can’t get any other way.” Yet there seems to exist little moral compass in the Academy surrounding the value of work and no healthy skepticism about the unfairness and illegality of so many of the internships into which schools are ceaselessly feeding their students. In response to a roiling debate over unpaid internships, no business lobbyists were seen trying to pre-empt normal enforcement of the law—instead it was a group of thirteen university presidents who recently wrote to the Department of Labor, complaining that protecting interns might get in the way of their brisk trade in academic credit and their cozy employer relationships. “While we share your concerns about the potential for exploitation, our institutions take great pains to ensure students are placed in secure and productive environments that further their education,” the presidents wrote, failing to mention their unwillingness or inability to screen out illegal placements. “We constantly monitor and reassess placements based on student feedback. We urge great caution … and we respectfully request that the Department of Labor reconsider undertaking the regulation of internships.”
Financial motives aside, why have schools lent such uncritical, decisive support to the internship boom—sometimes going so far as to require them? With the spread of career centers and career fairs over the past few decades, students “are explicitly being told you need to do an internship in order to be marketable after graduation,” says Gina Neff, “but they’re not given any context of what that means.” The view is echoed precisely by Gardner: “They’ve gotten the message that it’s got to be on your résumé. It’s one of the checklist things you have to do, and a lot of them do it without any understanding of what they’re really supposed to get out of it.”
At many schools and in many departments, the nudge has becomes a shove—students are required to take internships in order to graduate or to major in a particular field. In more applied fields and professional programs, this requirement, imposed regardless of whether or not the school helps to secure the positions, keeps the supply of available interns artificially massive. Neff did a survey of communications programs and found that “a pretty high number” now require that students complete an internship, “particularly if they’re in a journalism program” (even though program graduates will usually have to begin their journalism careers with an additional internship). In social work, nutrition, and psychology programs, influenced by the medical model, required internships are pervasive; likewise in public policy, criminal justice, marketing, advertising, management, business, human resources, culinary studies, hospitality, film, fashion, and other majors. “People within the academy don’t really think about their role in an economy of internships,” says Neff.
Universities apparently relish the additional influence that has come with brokering students’ future careers. If professors at elite colleges were once able to informally place many of their well-heeled students in jobs, the development of internship programs promised a more scalable and practical solution in an era of heightened competition in the job market. Anya Kamenetz, who has written on both internships and the history of higher education, links internships to the “maximalism,” symbolized by Clark Kerr’s concept of the “multiversity,” which took hold at American colleges in the 1960s. Kamenetz points to the spread of campus fitness centers, mental health counseling services, and scads of campus cultural organizations as parallel developments in which colleges have become involved “because they’re vaguely in the bailiwick of your college experience.” Perhaps well-intentioned, schools now push their students towards study abroad opportunities, civic engagement, “service learning,” and a whole suite of other extracurricular options that ostensibly develop character and burnish a résumé—nevertheless, says Phil Gardner, “the internship has to happen and all these other things now are going to be precursors.”
Although for-credit internships in many cases are a financial win for schools, some schools have also found donors to subsidize a range of scholarships, in effect helping to underwrite the internship boom by supporting unpaid positions, especially but not only at nonprofits and in the public sector. Neff says that “the biggest way internships get subsidized is through parents,” but an increasingly significant flow of subsidies is coming from colleges as well. Carolyn Wise, editor of The Vault Guide to Top Internships, has stated that 48 percent of colleges she has looked at offer some form of financial assistance for at least some unpaid interns. In one of the most dramatic examples, Smith College launched the Praxis program in 1998, a promise to provide every sophomore or junior with a $2,000 summer internship subsidy. Connecticut College and Amherst College (which places many students with alumni and parents) have similar, heavily used programs. Most prestigious schools at least provide financial support to a few dozen interns each year, typically through highly competitive merit-based scholarships—examples include the Brown Internship Award Program and the Director’s Internships at Harvard (which also arranges the high-profile placements). Such programs are as vulnerable to declines in the endowment or drop-offs in alumni giving as any others at a university: witness the planned slashes in the internship subsidies offered by the Rockefeller Center and the Tucker Foundation at Dartmouth.
The coverage provided by a Smith, Amherst, or Connecticut college is exceptional (though the actual amounts are relatively low), and administrators and students at most schools admit that subsidy programs rarely cover a fraction of the students who take unpaid internships. Kamenetz appraises the generosity of these schools in realistic terms: “The more money you spend per student, the more prestige you have [especially in collegiate rankings, which are based largely on proxies for such spending] … Since the more money you spend the more prestige you get, it makes sense to annex any kind of program you can think of to spend money on.” With reputation and alumni futures on the line, schools can’t afford to let their competitors get ahead in the internship race. It isn’t hard to guess where this leaves those at less well-heeled schools, or those trying to access internship opportunities outside of a school framework.
To a certain extent, and particularly in providing funding for unpaid internships, schools are simply reacting to the demands of their students, whose own role in driving the boom cannot be downplayed. High percentages of students claim that improving their job prospects is a fundamental motivation for attending college; the pressure on schools and professors to stay relevant to both social and economic realities has continued in various forms since the 1960s. Students have internalized the message that internships are the essential complement to class work, both a default summer mode and an important sideline during the academic year. If colleges, parents, and employers are pushing young people to invest in at least one significant internship, students are the ones “just collecting things,” in Phil Gardner’s words, piling on internship after internship in hopes of transcending ever-steeper competition.
Yet the intense competition in the job market has spread to internships themselves—for many organizations and industries, the key moment now comes at the junior or senior year internship, not after graduation: if you can break in earlier, your chances vastly improve. Getting an internship at a firm is certainly no guarantee of a job there later on, but the thinking is that not getting an internship may scuttle your chances permanently: at Goldman Sachs, 90 percent of entry-level hires in 2009 were reportedly former Goldman interns (that doesn’t mean, of course, that 90 percent of Goldman interns received job offers).6 Internship coordinators, especially in the “glamor industries” or at prestigious organizations, describe an ever-increasing deluge of applications: a prominent Washington think tank recently received 300 applications for five very low-paid internship slots ($1,000 per month, full-time); an international nonprofit based in Germany, though not a household name, typically receives between 100 and 400 applications for every low-stipended internship opening it has (400 Euros, or approximately $540, per month, full-time). When the director of newsroom recruitment for a small Virginia newspaper receives 300 applications for about a dozen internships offered, it should come as little surprise that internship programs at the White House, CNN, and so on accept fewer than 1 percent out of thousands of applicants.
Partly as a reaction to such stiff competition, and partly to break into organizations that might otherwise be closed to them, young people are increasingly creating their own internships—pitching their free labor to companies or bosses who are not advertising internships or planning to offer them. Employers of all shapes and sizes report receiving a stream of unsolicited emails and résumés from young people offering to work without pay. Such offers are sometimes too tempting to resist. Willy Franzen, who has reviewed hundreds of internships on his website One Day, One Internship, sees this “a lot more on the local level than on the national level”; the former has something resembling an “underground internship market” based on personal contacts. Franzen himself ended up working two summer internships for a company that makes fishing rods, marshaling a family connection and offering himself up as an intern “for the employee discount,” even though the firm had no advertised internship positions or established program.
Likewise, a Connecticut College senior pitched himself as the perfect candidate for a nonexistent unpaid internship at the Buenos Aires office of Universal Music—which took him up on the offer. A Wall Street Journal article admiringly described the example of Stephanie Gurtman, who requested an informational interview with a Tampa, Florida advertising agency in the summer after her freshman year. Although the firm was not advertising or planning to have an internship, they were happy to have someone assembling their press kits and conducting market research for free. The author of the Journal article describes her triumph: “The internship was unpaid, but she walked away with three letters of recommendation that helped her land future internships.” For many employers, the only limitation in accepting such offers is desk space.7
It is impossible to gauge, with the present lack of information, what percentage of internships are initiated by schools, by young people, or by employers—but each group has likely been a significant force, and internship positions or programs, once initiated, seem to take on a momentum of their own. The pressure for more internships—creating them, selling them, filling them, subsidizing them, legitimating them, even ranking them—is coming from all directions: from employers by turns opportunistic, rational, and afraid of being left behind; from a bottomless supply of harried, ambitious students; and from vociferous proponents in the Academy.
Internships are generally not top of the agenda for theoretical physicists and professors of comparative literature, but at least some in the Academy, perhaps unwittingly, have helped to prepare the cocktail of ideological motivations, justifications, and half-hearted excuses behind the internship boom. From new paradigms in educational theory and the sociology of work to “human capital” thinking in economics (which we’ll leave for Chapter 7), high-minded concepts are offered as vindications of the Academy’s role. If students and parents see internships simply as a good career move, no matter what’s actually being taught or learned, educators have been more mealy-mouthed about it, using philosophies such as “situated learning” and “experiential education” to present internships in an appropriately educational light.
“Situated learning,” which takes the cultural-historical psychology of Lev Vygotsky as its point of departure, “is premised on the view that knowledge is distributed across individuals and their environments, and is generated and mobilized in a constantly changing series of social interactions,” as Natalie Lundsteen puts it in her research on the educational content of internships. The environments in which Vygotsky explored learning were primarily cultural and linguistic, but psychologists and educators have since extended his approach to organizational and corporate cultures. In this view, an intern (or indeed an apprentice or co-op student) is not a vessel to be filled with training or knowledge, but an active agent embedded in a particular context, whose learning is cultural and mediated above all else.
A wide array of academics, coaches, career counselors, and even employers have come to accept the importance of informal, “situated” learning—but to such an extent that many of them seem dismissive of formal training. Education expert Paul Hager writes that “advances in educational thought” effectively debunk the “learning-as-product” view at the root of traditional apprenticeship and classroom education, which can simply be chalked up to “a mass production mindset reminiscent of the industrial era.”8 The traditional master-apprentice relationship is revealed as childish and outmoded; the mentor-protégé relationship takes its place. A young person is sent to enter a “community of practice” and experience a personal transformation, rather than learn a distinct set of skills, earn a wage, and go home for the evening. Learning can be discontinuous, complex, frequently interrupted; unlearning may be just as important. This perspective helps explain why many educators have never seen an internship they didn’t like—one supposedly learns as much from terrible experiences as from good ones: George Washington University states upfront that 50 percent of their students decide to leave the entire field in which they’ve just interned, not to mention individual employers. Most profound and perhaps most disturbing of all, almost anything that brings “exposure” can now be considered a learning experience—flipping burgers for Disney, having a chat at the water cooler, spending an afternoon at the copy machine.
Dovetailing closely with the theory of situative learning is the experiential education movement, traced by many of its American proponents to the writings of philosopher John Dewey. Experiential modes are now so prevalent at all levels of education and personal development that they have become almost impossible to detect, from elementary school fieldtrips to the Outward Bound program. Although associated with a progressive social and political outlook, opposed to hierarchies and engaging the inherent creativity of students, experiential education neglects the need for dedicated training and provides a convenient rationale for inexpensive, laissez-faire replacements.
Even if we sympathize with the open-minded worldview of situated learning and experiential education, we can deplore the broad misuse of these theories—they have proven to be an invitation to cost-cutting. They stand as crucial intellectual justification not only for internships, but for a whole range of practices associated with the “new spirit of capitalism” described in detail by Boltanski and Chiapello, in which networked firms leverage their “organizational capital” to move flexibly from project to project.9 What structured training programs were to the bureaucratic firms of the mid-twentieth century internships may well be to the new network capitalism of firms dealing in intangible goods. There certainly seems to be a close match between the types of firms and industries that have transformed themselves or grown up along these lines and those that have embraced internships. One of the most common complaints about internships—“it was totally unstructured”—is little heeded.
Just as hierarchical, stepwise education has been discredited in favor of a series of immersive “experiences,” steady career progress over a lifetime is dismissed in favor of lateral movement from project to project. How does a view like this impact career advancement and social mobility? The new rhetoric of “learning on the job,” “learning as you go,” “jumping right in,” and “being a self-starter”—prevalent in the internship world—draws on these critiques of dedicated training, and opens the way to “just being there” being good enough. “People do learn as they do jobs,” says Dan Jacoby, an expert on the history of apprenticeship who has researched different learning strategies. But, he adds, it is doubtful “whether they learn well or effectively” when it’s all “on the job.” “You can’t put Task B in front of Task A if Task B requires that you know Task A … It’s not all that different from what takes place in math class. If you put somebody into a class doing calculus and they haven’t really understood what algebra’s about, they’re going to have a difficult time figuring out what’s going on.”
No one would deny that schools have a responsibility to ready their students for work, just as much as for citizenship. Unfortunately, internships, so weakly connected to the classroom, represent only a sad feint in this direction. Indeed, present-day educators might look for inspiration to an earlier attempt to connect Industry and the Academy: cooperative education—a strikingly pre-professional approach to higher education in which college students divide their time between the classroom and a work setting. “Co-op,” as it is familiarly called, was pioneered in 1906 by Herman Schneider, then dean of engineering at the University of Cincinnati. Schneider felt that a traditional university education hardly suited the demands of new technical fields and large industrial concerns—already the animating concern behind most reforms in American higher education over the previous four decades. The major new American universities of the late nineteenth century—private foundations like Johns Hopkins and Stanford as well as the land-grant colleges centered on “such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts”—were already taking their cue from the industrial revolution. For Schneider, however, the introduction of practical and applied subjects was not nearly enough; he proposed the radical step of fully integrating classroom and workshop, Academy and Industry. At well-known, “true co-op schools”—such as Cincinnati, Northeastern, and Drexel, which now bills its co-op program as “the ultimate internship”—the combination of academic work and career preparation was elevated to a high art form.
Although internships are often compared to or classed alongside coops, there is no mistaking the differences. The co-op movement centered on a structured, intensive, high-cost model of collaboration between colleges and firms; the co-op philosophy of deep integration between school and work—such that classroom lectures on a given topic might be followed, almost immediately, by a chance to perform related tasks in the factory or office—has been diluted almost beyond recognition with internships. Compensation for the substantive work performed by students was always the norm, whether provided by the employer, the school, or some combination of the two. Most programs ultimately settled on five years as the typical length of enrollment, reasoning that students would trade the extra year in return for enhanced skills and job prospects—as much as half of a co-op student’s time might be spent working in industry. The systems of faculty supervision and evaluation developed were much more standardized and rigorous than anything that has ever been the norm for internships: faculty at co-op schools were incentivized to evaluate directly their students’ efforts in the workplace rather than just glance at or rubber-stamp a boss’s report.
By the 1960s, the cooperative education model had become prominent and influential enough to attract Congress’s interest and benefit from an era of unprecedented expansion in higher education. Over the next few decades, a total of over $220 million flowed from the federal government into the co-op programs of colleges around the country. An account published in the Journal of Higher Education in 1969 recorded at least 130 schools involved in co-op education nationally and over 60,000 students, earning a gross income of $120 million annually from over 4,000 employers—by 1983, the number of such programs at schools, feeding off this generous funding supply, had ballooned to over 1,000. In certain professions—engineering, most notably—co-op had very nearly become the dominant model, responsible for launching the careers of hundreds of thousands. That year also saw the founding of what is now called the World Association for Cooperative Education (WACE), which represents universities and businesses in forty-three different countries on every continent—the capstone of years of global evangelism by American co-op champions.10
Yet this entire system, once fired by a sizable body of research and embraced for a wide range of fields, very nearly collapsed with the withdrawal of federal funding in the early 1990s. Today it is a shell of its former self. Politicians evidently believed they had done enough for cooperative education, a mere line item for a Congress focused on bigger issues in higher education and given to capricious funding decisions. Another reason for the co-op collapse, some say, is the “vocational” stigma that it retained in the eyes of ambitious students and parents, and within the elite echelons of higher education, where co-op never penetrated. Co-op booster Richard Walter also admits that, although federal funding led to rapid development, “unfortunately, some [co-op programs] were shams created solely to secure funds rather than as a means of providing students with the advantages gained through well-run programs.”
Phil Gardner watched events unfold at close hand: “A lot of co-op programs just collapsed or were converted to internship programs … Now co-ops have many of the same characteristics as internships.” Unable or unwilling to prop up their co-op programs without outside support, many schools turned to internships as a low-cost, au courant solution that shifted the responsibility and the financial burden onto the student. Where co-op offices arranged and actively managed placements, career offices instead provide vague internship tips and administer Myers-Briggs tests. “Now you can’t get the genie back in the bottle,” says Gardner of the transition made by many schools from co-ops to internships, where there is little attempt “to integrate an academically oriented classroom with its application outside the classroom.” Although supported by schools in several integral ways, internships remain much more at arm’s length than co-ops ever were, and Gardner sees the gradual decoupling of internships from schools as a significant, worrying trend for educators, not to mention interns and their families: “Too many students just do these on their own, nobody knows what they’re getting out of them. They throw it on their résumé and then when you start talking to them about their skills, they can’t define them. It’s not been a routinized experience that actually positions them for the jobs they want.”
Today, co-op programs have remained a force at relatively few schools—the University of Waterloo in Ontario, for one, still soldiers on with the world’s largest program, enrolling 11,000 co-op students who work for over 3,000 employers, while Northeastern offers a five-year Bachelor’s that includes eighteen months of experience with up to three employers. Yet even these living models, directly descended from Schneider’s vision, have been eroded and transformed by the withdrawal of funding and faculty. The Journal of Cooperative Education, which Gardner has edited since the co-op collapse, changed its name to the Journal of Cooperative Education and Internships, seeking, in vain, to engage a new audience. Co-op programs nonetheless provided, and continue to provide, a powerful alternative to the no-holds-barred race for internships, for which they unwittingly set the stage. Properly construed and implemented, they might still represent a humane and cutting-edge answer, incubated in the Academy, to the question of how students become workers. But instead of championing such a model, schools take the easier and cheaper road of promoting unpaid, insubstantial work off-campus—appealing to their students’ idealism by describing all these opportunities, almost anywhere outside the business world, as a way of “serving the community.”