At the University of Vermont last spring, a business undergraduate student took a hiatus from the classroom and stepped into a full-time job at BETA Technologies, an electric aviation company based near Burlington. The placement was part of the first cohort of a new co-op program at U.V.M.’s Grossman School of Business. At first, the student wasn’t confident, or even sure this was the kind of work he wanted to do. But over several months in financial planning and analysis at BETA, he began leading projects, making presentations, and eventually even training other employees. Now back at U.V.M. for his senior year, the placement was such a success that he continues to work 10 to 20 hours a week for the company.
UVM’s new program is one example of a larger rethinking of where workforce experience meets undergraduate education. Internships and co-ops are not new to higher ed. But today’s A.I.-disrupted workforce gives them new gravity. As employers increasingly look for evidence that applicants are work-ready — and as student families eye R.O.I. — more colleges are expanding internships, co-ops, and apprenticeships to show results with more direct on-ramps into careers.
Some higher-education thinkers are imagining more fundamental changes, with aspirational models that envision students looping repeatedly between classrooms and the working world, making experiential learning part of the architecture of college rather than one of its offerings.
Beyond the undergraduate years lies an even bigger question about lifelong learning. Will technological and workforce changes require workers to learn and relearn throughout increasingly long careers? If ongoing retraining is in the cards, should colleges be preparing students to move back and forth between work and ongoing education for life?
Shrinking the Experience Gap
The question of whether new graduates are adequately prepared to join the workforce has become more urgent as the entry-level labor market changes. A.I. can increasingly perform tasks once assigned to junior employees, while employers are asking new hires to arrive with skills — and experience — that previous generations would acquire on the job.
Dan Hatch is a professor of web design and user experience at Utah Valley University who spent about 25 years in the field before entering academia. Yet for seven summers, he has returned to technology companies as a faculty “extern,” brushing up on industry skills and learning firsthand what his students will need to break into the field. This past summer, he went back with a particular question: How is A.I. changing what students will need to know and removing the entry-level work through which they traditionally gain experience?
Entry-level employees have traditionally gotten their start doing the kinds of basic tasks that allow them to accumulate experience and judgment. Now, Hatch told Inside Higher Ed, “A.I. can eat that stuff for breakfast.” The dilemma he sees is how students break into the business if some junior-level work disappears.
“What if you could get the skills you needed and then seamlessly re-enter the workforce highway — if you could enter and exit as needed?”
The familiar complaint is that college graduates aren’t prepared for work, but the picture is more nuanced than that. In the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Job Outlook 2026 survey, 71 percent of employers considered new graduates somewhat well prepared, but only 22 percent considered them very well prepared. Similarly, 42 percent said graduates’ skills were very closely aligned with their hiring needs, while 56 percent called them only partially aligned. Communication, professionalism, and critical thinking remained particular areas for improvement. But in teamwork and technology, students’ experience aligned well with employer expectations.
Ryan Craig, author of “Apprentice Nation,” sees a shift in expectations from the employer side. As managing director of Achieve Partners, he connects young adults with early-career apprenticeships in technology, healthcare, and other industries, and has a front-row seat on the experience gap. “Colleges are doing as good a job as they’ve ever done at equipping students with the cognitive skills and critical thinking skills and communication skills and durable skills,” Craig said. “The problem is that the goalposts have moved.”
Craig calls one of those changes “experience inflation:” Employers increasingly expect applicants for entry-level positions to arrive with relevant work experience. His preferred solution is paid apprenticeships, often as an alternative pathway to traditional higher education, and his firm invests in companies that build such pathways in fields that benefit from a staffing pipeline.
For colleges, that model presents a direct challenge to remain relevant. Could more of that on-the-job experience be built into higher education itself? And what should it look like?
Putting Work Directly into the Degree
Cooperative education has been doing some version of work-integrated learning for more than a century. The University of Cincinnati pioneered co-op in 1906; Northeastern followed soon afterward, and Drexel and Rochester Institute of Technology developed major programs of their own.
At established co-op universities, students can move repeatedly between substantial stretches of academic study and professional work, and new programs suggest fresh interest in the structure. U.V.M.’s Grossman School sent its first business co-op students to employers in early 2026. The University at Albany’s Massry School of Business also launched a program this year, built around four-to-five-month paid, full-time placements during an academic semester, after which students return to classes. Rowan University in New Jersey is expanding engineering co-ops that can span six to nine months and earn academic credit. The scale varies dramatically, but the core idea is similar: Give students enough time in a workplace to move beyond observation and begin doing consequential work.
That distinction matters to Stephanie Meunier, director of the Grossman Co-op. U.V.M.’s optional placements run four to six months, rather than the eight or ten weeks typical of many summer internships. In that time, she said, students can get through onboarding, become independent, and take ownership of projects.
Yet U.V.M. also demonstrates how awkwardly substantial work experiences can fit inside a degree still structured primarily around semesters spent in classrooms. Grossman students currently receive a notation on their transcript but no academic credit for the co-op, despite stepping away from classes for the placement. Staying on a four-year path may require students to arrive with A.P. or dual-enrollment credits, carry heavier course loads, or take summer classes. Meunier wants that to change. Her longer-term goal is to integrate co-op into the curriculum and eventually make it a requirement of the business degree.
That raises a strategic question: If students are learning important things while working, how should colleges recognize that learning?
Connie Yowell, the executive director of Northeastern’s Center for the Future of Higher Education and Work, has spent much of her career examining that recognition. In earlier work on digital credentials and the learning network LRNG, she challenged a system in which, as she explained in a 2017 Education Week interview, “the only learning that counts is what happens in school.” Education, she said, instead needs to “allow learning to happen in a variety of places, and for it to count.”
Her work on digital badges — a proposed way to document skills learned outside traditional coursework — grew partly from that problem. If learning occurs at an employer or somewhere else outside a classroom, learners need ways to make what they know visible and portable. Imagine the scouting mindset for careers, minus the sash: This student has achieved this skill through this experience. It could also mean redesigning the relationship between education and work, rather than simply adding a better internship program to a conventional degree.
The Cloverleaf University
Michelle Weise, author of “Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs That Don’t Even Exist Yet,” has spent much of her career studying the intersection of postsecondary education and work. Her fundamental question is how an education system built largely around learning first and working afterward can serve people facing repeated job and career transitions over much longer working lives.
“When I wrote the book, I was struck by the idea of needing to learn for changing jobs going on indefinitely. Early boomers were having 12 job changes by the time they retired. So with all of these technological advancements, we could easily imagine having to do 20 or 30,” Weise said. “How in the world are we going to somehow keep up with this many transitions over a lifetime? We need the university to adjust to this with a new approach. What if you could get the skills you needed and then seamlessly re-enter the workforce highway — if you could enter and exit as needed?”
She has developed those ideas into a model she calls the Cloverleaf University. A learner leaves the workforce on an exit ramp into education, gains knowledge or skills, and then takes an on-ramp back into work. Later, the learner may exit again. Repeated over time, those looping ramps begin to resemble a highway cloverleaf, or a series of them.
For undergraduates, the concept could mean multiple loops between school and work rather than one transition at graduation or one summer internship near the end of college. Students might study, spend substantial time working, and then return to school with a better understanding of what they know and don’t know, and go out again.
Weise’s Cloverleaf idea is broader than an expanded co-op program. It combines several strands of her thinking: work-based experiences; interdisciplinary learning, organized around complex real-world problems; and a university capable of serving learners not only at 18 or 22 but repeatedly across their working lives.
One reason work experiences matter, she argues, is that they develop something difficult to acquire from instruction alone: practical judgment. With A.I. increasingly capable of performing some technical and entry-level tasks, Weise worries about what happens if young workers lose opportunities to develop judgment by doing the kinds of work beginners have traditionally done. She invokes the Aristotelian concept of phronesis: practical wisdom, or the ability to weigh competing considerations and decide what to do when a problem doesn’t have a tidy answer. That involves technical knowledge but also what are sometimes called soft skills — what Weise prefers to call human skills — developed in the real world and given expansive context by looping in and out of a liberal education.
“It’s not simply about the technical skills,” Weise said. Students confronting a real problem have to weigh different kinds of information and consider the second-, third- and fourth-order consequences of their decisions. “All of that is the liberal arts. It’s just that it’s in context of a real problem to be solved.”
Opening the Loop
More than a decade ago, designers at Stanford University asked a question that Weise found inspiring: Why should a university education be consumed all at once in sequential classes on campus? In 2013 and 2014, amid the growth of online learning as a disrupter of residential-based education, a Stanford d.school team spent a year imagining possible futures for the university, called Stanford 2025.
Kelly Schmutte, now the director of undergraduate studies in design at Stanford’s d.school, worked on Stanford 2025 and said the resulting project was intentionally speculative, creating models designed to be thought-provoking — not literally implemented.
“The project suggested that it would be much more effective to have these periods of learning on campus interspersed with loops of learning that happens out in the world, whether doing research or apprenticing or working,” Schmutte said. “Those perspectives and experiences inform how you approach your education and make you more intentional.”
One proposal was called Open Loop University. Instead of four consecutive undergraduate years followed by graduation, Open Loop imagined students receiving six years of access to Stanford residential learning that could be distributed over a much longer period. Students might study, leave for work or research, return, leave again — and potentially reserve some of that university experience for much later in life.
Schmutte still sees value in that movement. There is value, she said, in “getting off the track and out of your bubble and comfort zone.” Being in a different environment, among different people and ways of working, can “wake up” students, she said, helping them bring better questions back to their education. A loop can focus a student more sharply on an existing interest — or send that student somewhere unexpected.
Another part of Open Loop seems more relevant than ever: lifelong learning. When the concept was developed, its designers could not have anticipated today’s generative A.I. boom. Now, Schmutte said, she can imagine the value of saving a year or two of one’s educational allotment for one’s 50s or 60s, when the technology — and what a worker needs to know — could look dramatically different. Being able to dip back into one’s educational pool would be especially useful at critical junctures of personal flux and industry change.
Who Builds the Ramps, and When Do You Hang the Degree?
It is easy to draw loops on a diagram. It is considerably harder and more disruptive to redesign a university around them. U.V.M.’s modest new co-op program already encounters questions involving credits, housing, scheduling, and degree completion. A Cloverleaf or Open Loop model would challenge assumptions embedded much more deeply in accreditation, financial aid, university finances, and academic departments, not to mention the question of when, exactly, one’s “education” is considered “earned.”
Existing apprenticeships offer opportunities from diverse arrangements, including many well outside of university degree programs. The number of registered apprenticeships grew by 65 percent between 2014 and 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, to nearly 680,000, but expanding them requires infrastructure that can be expensive and labor-intensive. Employers must provide training and supervision; learners may need advising and other support; and intermediaries are often needed to connect employers, programs, and students.
Then there is a surprisingly basic problem: What happens if a loop works too well? If a student leaves college for a work experience, fits in effectively, and is offered a good job, what draws that student back to campus to finish the degree? A desirable job on the table now is quite a bird in the hand. At Roger Williams University, for example, the well-connected degree program in Construction Management proves so effective at linking students with workforce experiences that the school boasts a nearly 100 percent graduate employment track record. One administrator at the school jokes that their challenge is luring students back on campus and completion after a lucrative junior summer spent in the field.
For Stanford’s Schmutte, the onus is on colleges to make what happens on campus compelling enough to merit the return. Universities need to help students recognize that they are acquiring more than “discrete pockets of knowledge,” she said. They are acquiring broader capacities and ways of thinking that can transfer across many kinds of work.
Weise responds to the question a bit differently. Perhaps students don’t always need to return immediately. “Why do we need them to get it all on the front end of their work lives?” she asked. A young person might leave, work for several years, and discover both what they like and the ceiling imposed by what they don’t yet know. That moment — recognizing the gap between what you can do and what you want to do — could itself become the reason to return to education. But that only works if returning is worth it.
“The only incentive for someone to come back is to really believe that that learning experience has the signal power that an employer wants,” Weise said. Universities cannot design these systems alone. Employers have to walk the talk that they value the additional learning and allow people to learn without sacrificing income and stature. “There also has to be an implicit promise on the part of employers that if you leave and get ‘trained up,’ they’re going to value that and be open to hiring people who’ve been out of the workforce to pursue that.”
The complexity helps explain why century-old co-op programs aren’t ubiquitous. They also put today’s smaller experiments in perspective. What they demonstrate is that repeated crossing of the boundary between academic and professional life can become part of the structure of a degree. But it requires sophisticated, savvy planning, employer buy-in, and university willingness to step away from the traditional, established way of doing things.
When it works, it can be revolutionary. “A higher education institution might have a separate arm that is functioning as an intermediary with the employer, saying, ‘What is the unmet need in your company? Let’s backward map from there to what you need, and I’m going to build you that talent pipeline to be able to do your work,’” Weise said. “This has been going on for a long time. It’s just not been very nimble and requires a different way of thinking about partnering with employers, and employers have to have skin in the game.”
Mirroring the Real World
What these models share is an increasing open-mindedness to seeking work experiences early and often, a resourcefulness of where to turn for ongoing learning, and resilience to pivot when things don’t go as planned. This is perhaps a key part of the experiential learning that can be foundational in higher education. U.V.M.’s Meunier believes a meaningful co-op doesn’t have to end with a career commitment to be successful. “One of the biggest learning outcomes could be finding out what you don’t want to do, and what a great way to do it within your academic setting,” she said. “You have the safety of returning to your degree and then trying out something else.”
In the big picture, a successful work experience is one that allows a student to communicate professionally, exercise judgment, solve problems, and demonstrate how they have used those abilities in the field under the tutelage of a real-world employer.
For undergraduates like U.V.M.’s student at BETA Technologies, that has already happened on a small scale. When he graduates, he won’t have to convince a prospective employer that he might be able to do that kind of work. To some extent, he already has.
