Category: Access & Inclusion

To Angelina Rojas and her classmates at TechBoston Academy, gun violence isn’t an abstract policy issue. It’s a lived reality. 

Rojas and many other kids at the Dorchester middle and high school have friends and family members who have been injured or killed by guns. Three years ago, a teacher and a student were shot outside the school as they boarded a bus bound for the state basketball game. 

So when Rojas took the stage with seven of her peers last month to offer a solution to the gun violence epidemic, she spoke with passion and a sense of urgency.

“We’ve learned that people are uncomfortable, scared to have this conversation about gun violence,” she told a panel of judges. They would decide whether her group would get to present its solution on a much bigger stage: The Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual gathering of global leaders, funders and entrepreneurs. “It became our job — our job! — to become voices for victims, for survivors. 

“My cousin was shot. He is paralyzed,” Rojas said, her voice rising to a shout. “I’m here because of him!”

The presentation was part of the annual Aspen Challenge, a 10-week long program that invites teams of high schoolers to develop durable solutions to complex societal problems. Started in 2013 in Los Angeles, the challenge has spread to 11 other cities, spending two years in each location. It landed in Boston this year. 

For students like Rojas, the challenge is an opportunity to make concrete change in their own communities. For their schools, it’s a way to cultivate the human skills employers are demanding — skills like communication, collaboration, and problem-solving.

A 2022 evaluation of the program found that participants showed an increase in skills such as collaboration, resilience, leadership efficacy, and social perspective-taking.

The challenge may also be part of the answer to rising rates of disengagement in school, said Rebecca Winthrop, co-author of The Disengaged Teen. By enlisting teens in solving problems that affect them directly, the activity provides both relevance and agency — two key antidotes to disengagement, according to Winthrop.

“A lot of kids don’t see the point of school,” she said. “They don’t see how what they’re doing is connected to the real world.” 

In Boston, the work began in January, when teams from 17 of the city’s high schools gathered to hear local and national leaders present on five issues chosen by the students: affordable housing, community violence, access to green spaces, post-secondary pathways, and the role of social media in glamorizing substance abuse. Among the speakers was Manuel Oliver, whose son Joaquin was killed in a high school shooting in Parkland, Fl. in 2018. 

Oliver, whose organization, Change the Ref, seeks to empower young people to fight for stricter gun control laws, showed students videos and pictures of provocative protests and disturbing ad campaigns that his group has produced to get lawmakers’ attention.

He told the teens about the time he got arrested for scaling a construction crane near the White House to hang a banner about gun violence and urged the students to take risks — within limits.

“I don’t want you to get arrested,” he told them. “I just tell you that sometimes you want the attention, and you use the guerilla style to get it.”

Oliver’s challenge to the students — to produce a media campaign that would raise awareness around the gun violence epidemic and empower youth nationwide to take action in creating safer schools and communities — appealed to students at TechBoston Academy immediately.

“It’s heartbreaking to see article after article about gun violence,” said Brian Hodge, the TechBoston team captain, partway through the kickoff. 

But there were still three more issues to hear about before the group would pick one. 

The event drew representatives from Boston’s school board and district leadership, including assistant superintendent for strategic initiatives Anne Rogers Clark, who said the challenge aligns with the district’s goal of developing future leaders for Boston.

Clark said conversations with decision makers in other cities that have joined the challenge convinced those in Boston that “it changes the orientation of how students view themselves,” helping them “develop a sense of themselves as agents of change in the larger world.”

The district encouraged its high schools to identify “emerging leaders,” for the challenge, rather than established ones like the student body president. They wanted students with potential, students “who haven’t had the opportunity to show what they can do,” Clark said.   

Many of the students who participate in the challenge, in Boston and other cities, come from low-income communities of color that are often overlooked or underestimated by policymakers, said Katie Fitzgerald, director of the Aspen Challenge.

“The biggest untapped resource in our communities is young minds,” she said. “They have the answers. They just need us to get out of their way.”

“The biggest untapped resource in our communities is young minds.”

Studies show that student engagement drops precipitously between elementary and high school. In one recent survey by Winthrop and her colleagues, three quarters of third graders said they loved school, but only a quarter of tenth graders said the same.

While this problem isn’t exactly new, the consequences of disengagement are higher than they once were, according to Winthrop, who is director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. 

“Students can’t just coast along and develop the high-level skills they need to succeed in the workforce,” she said.

Jeri Robinson, the chair of the Boston School Committee, laid some of the blame for disengagement on what she sees as outdated methods of educating children. 

“Our way of doing schooling for the last 100 years has not taken advantage of the things students experience day-to-day,” Robinson said at the kickoff. “Kids are bored with school because we make it boring.”

“Our way of doing schooling for the last 100 years has not taken advantage of the things students experience day-to-day.”

The Aspen Challenge is one of numerous efforts being undertaken by districts, schools, and nonprofits to make learning more relevant and engaging for students. But such work remains at the margins of the education system, Winthrop said.

Following the kickoff, the teams had 10 days to choose an issue to tackle. Then they had to design a solution, develop a work plan, and craft a budget. Each team was given $500 in seed money by the Aspen Challenge, which is funded by the Bezos Family Foundation. 

At TechBoston Academy, students chose to focus on gun violence because they felt that the official response to the shooting at their school had been inadequate. They wanted their district and the city to do more to prevent gun violence and to help students recover from its trauma, according to Bruce Pontbriand, the civics and government teacher who served as the group’s leader. The project’s tentative theme was “broken promises, broken hope,” he said.

“Adults have been promising things and falling flat on those promises,” Pontbriand said. 

Still, the students wanted the documentary that they envisioned to end on a positive note, to uplift the school community and help it heal, he said.

Healing, Pontbriand said, is something that the teachers and staff at BostonTech need as much as the students. He still thinks about the fact that he could have been on the bus that was shot at if he hadn’t had a headache and decided to drive to the game. 

“To help them, we need to get over our own stuff,” he said. 

Halfway through the challenge, in late March, each of the teams received a visit from a member of the Aspen Challenge staff. At TechBoston, Arisaid Gonzalez Porras, operations coordinator, showed up with Japanese cheesecake and enormous blueberry muffins.  

The students, all of whom are 11th graders in Pontbriand’s AP Government class, told Gonzalez Porras how TechBoston has been scarred by the shooting and how it has negatively influenced others’ perceptions of their school.

“It paints us in a bad light,” said Aaron Curry. “I hear people talking about our school, and that’s not us.” 

The students said their documentary would be both educational and transformative. It would teach kids to make better choices, while also instilling hope and a sense of unity.

“We are all going to rise together with this video,” Rojas said. 

Five weeks into the 10-week challenge, the students had already reached out to district leaders, public officials, city councilmembers, and grassroots organizations and conducted several focus groups and one-on-one filmed interviews. 

Gonzalez Porras praised their progress and asked pointed questions about how the students would promote their video and measure its impact. She wanted to know what their call to action would be and encouraged them to consider how they might continue their work after the competition ends. 

“The judges like it when you’re thinking about scaling,” she said. 

Hodge, the team captain, was quick to respond.

“When we win the Aspen Challenge, we plan to use the money to start a nonprofit,” he said. 

Gonzalez Porras indulged his optimism. “When you’re in Aspen, make sure you call out to people in the audience” who might provide funding, she suggested.

Over the next few weeks, the students edited the video for their documentary and got 11 city council members to sign a pledge to provide more support for prevention and healing. 

Finally, in late April, it was time to pitch their solution.

Teams in the Aspen Challenge are evaluated based on a one-page written report, a six-minute on-stage presentation, and an exhibit. The judges want evidence that students worked well together and engaged in meaningful collaboration with members of their communities. They’re looking for big ideas that take a creative approach to a stubborn problem. And they want proof that a team’s solution has made a sustainable impact.

At the end of the day, three teams would be awarded the grand prize: an all-expenses paid trip to the Aspen Ideas Festival. Three others would take home prizes for originality, collaboration, and resiliency, and one would be chosen by their peers for a “People’s Choice” award.

The TechBoston team introduced members, their team name, Team Unity, and an updated, more inspirational, theme: “Keep Hope Alive!” They showed a two-minute snippet of their documentary that included news coverage of the shooting at their school and testimony from team members whose families have been affected by gun violence. They answered questions about the obstacles they’d encountered during their project and the themes that emerged from their focus groups. 

When, at the end of the day, they were bypassed for an award, it came as a big disappointment, Pontbriand said.

“We had to relive a lot of that [trauma] before we got to the solution piece,” he wrote in an e-mail. “After the announcement, the kids were a bit retraumatized.”

In a group interview a couple weeks later, Curry said students were “still working through the emotions” around the loss and “taking a hiatus to focus on school.”

But Team Unity hasn’t given up on its mission to change the way the district and city prevent and respond to gun violence. The students are working with Pontbriand to design a course that will allow them to continue their work next year. Pontbriand said that Snoop Dogg’s son, film producer Cordell Broadas, has offered to help the team finish its documentary and “take it to the next level.” 

The students are also collaborating with three city counselors to create more afterschool activities for high schoolers, after a survey showed that less than half of students at their school feel like they belong. They want their peers to find positive communities, so they don’t wind up in negative ones.

“The Aspen Challenge is over, but the work is not,” Pontbriand said in the interview.

Robinson, the school board chair, hopes that the challenge’s goal of engaging students in real-world problem solving won’t end here, either.

“It can’t be two months and done,” she said at the kickoff. “What will the district and the city learn from this?”

“I’m hoping it will create as much change in our adults as in our kids,” she said. 

Allie Jutton graduated from high school in 2022 with a pile of Advanced Placement credits and few options to put them to use at the kind of small liberal arts college she wanted to attend. But she knew she could save a lot of time and money if she could find a school that counted her A.P. work toward her degree.

Jutton, who grew up in Lakeville, Minn., landed at the University of Minnesota Morris. It offered the small college feel—just shy of 1,000 undergraduate students—and a well-publicized Degree in Three program, which could save students like her about $20,000 by graduating in three years, instead of four.

Jutton was sold. And now she’s graduating with a degree in psychology and a minor in gender, women, and sexuality studies and plans to attend Minnesota State University, Mankato in the fall for a master’s in mental health counseling.

“I came in with a lot of general education courses already done, like statistics, history, geography, and English,” Jutton said.​​ “It was cost-effective for me and my family, and it allowed me to get my degree a little faster.” 

At Morris, the Degree in Three program isn’t a new concept. Students with the drive and desire have always had the option to finish the standard 120 credits to earn a bachelor’s degree in a shortened time frame. However, it wasn’t until 2024 that the college openly advertised that all of its 32 majors could be completed in three years, if students chose to do so.

Morris is one of almost 50 institutions that have joined the College-in-3 Exchange, a nonprofit organization advocating for more undergraduate degree options that take less time to complete. The collective includes a diversity of institutions, from Georgetown University and the University of Miami, to Merrimack College and Portland State. When the incubator started in 2021, a dozen institutions signed on—and the group has grown each year.

“Higher ed needs to be reimagined in all kinds of ways, and this is a very practical way to create a catalyst for rethinking undergraduate education,” Lori Carrell, chancellor of the University of Minnesota Rochester, said. She founded College-in-3 alongside Robert Zemsky, professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Higher ed needs to be reimagined in all kinds of ways, and this is a very practical way to create a catalyst for rethinking undergraduate education.”

Nationwide, about 64 percent of students who start a degree program finish it within six years, with an average loan debt among borrowers of $29,300, according to the College Board. In 2023, Carrell testified to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development about how the College-in-3 concept could improve student retention, degree completion, and career launch, either by developing accelerated 120-credit degrees or creating new curricula that reduce the credit requirement to 90.

“Accreditors have opened their doors to this,” Carrell said. 

Not for Everybody

While financial wellbeing is an obvious benefit of earning a degree in three years, the College-in-3 movement continues to head off concerns about less-desirable repercussions for students, like increased stress, feelings of overwhelm, or a rushed college experience. 

Jutton shared those concerns, initially. Her fears were eased after mapping out the course work with her advisor, taking into account the credits she brought with her from high school. Still, Jutton worked two jobs while in school, as a resident assistant and also as an assistant in the student engagement and events office. During her second year, she took 20 credits each semester. It was a lot at the time, but Jutton believes the experience also gave her skills that she’ll use forever.

“It taught me valuable life lessons. I’m really good at time management and my organizational skills are better than they were coming into college,” Jutton said. “I was able to recognize when I needed help and ask for it, as well as set boundaries for what I can and cannot do.”

As more institutions are joining the College-in-3 Exchange, they are also considering how to design curricula that take student mental health and wellbeing into account, Carrell said.

“The worry that you’re just going to rush students through and turn degrees into credentials, instead of deep, transformative learning? Nothing could be farther from what we’re doing,” she said.

Janet Schrunk Ericksen, chancellor at Morris, said that since the college started actively promoting the three-year option in February 2024, it’s been well received. The Degree in Three program features prominently on the website, and Ericksen said that it receives more page views than any other part of the site. Visitors also spend more time looking at the information.

“We serve a large percentage of students from historically underrepresented populations—low-income, first-generation students,” Ericksen said. “Giving them this path is important.”

Ericksen acknowledges, however, that completing a 120-credit bachelor’s degree in a condensed timeline isn’t for everybody. It’s easier for those who can use A.P. credit or pursued dual enrollment in high school, earning some college credits before arriving on campus. Most students also take a summer class or two along the way. She believes that certain degrees also lend themselves to quicker completion than others. Physics, for example, requires foundational knowledge before moving on to the next levels, so the major might be more challenging to finish in less than four years. 

“It’s not going to work for students who change their major six times or who want a triple major—and we have a fair number of those,” Ericksen said. “But the students who are really focused, they’re saying, ‘Yes, this is what I want, and it’s great to have a clear path.’”

An opportunity for experiential learning 

Institutions like Brigham Young University – Idaho, which serves an older population of working adults taking online classes, are finding that eliminating elective courses and reducing degree credits to 90 or 94 are helping students complete programs in majors like business management, applied health, and family and human services. The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, an accrediting body, approved the truncated programs in 2023.

Still, not everybody is sold on the validity of a 90-credit degree. Some higher education experts and faculty members are concerned that it will create a two-tiered system and that employers may not value the degrees equally. 

But Madeleine Green, executive director of the College-in-3 Exchange, said the timing for higher education to make such changes is “propitious.”

“For all the questions that are out there about the value of a degree, employability of graduates, the cost of higher education, those are all factors that I think have propelled institutions to think about alternative pathways,” Green said.

Designing three-year degree programs with industry partners is leading to better outcomes, Carrell said. At the University of Minnesota Rochester, for example, students in health-related majors are offered paid internships at the Mayo Clinic, as well as job interviews upon graduation. The partnership has also helped the faculty design a tight curriculum that ensures that students are prepared for the workforce, while building in strategies like block scheduling, success coaches, and capstone experiences that contribute to student wellbeing.

“To know that there are these dire workforce shortages in healthcare deserts and we’re producing people who can go out and serve communities sooner is very, very satisfying,” Carrell said.

Peh Ng, chair of the division of science and mathematics at Morris, said the students she’s helped guide through three-year degrees aren’t missing out on the hallmark experiences of college, like undergraduate research, study abroad, and internships. Still, those who arrive at Morris without having earned any college-level credits have a much more challenging time finishing in less than four years—and often they don’t.

“A three-year program is really not for every student, but if a student tries it and it doesn’t work, then they finish it in four years. So at the end of the day, it bodes well for four-year graduation rates,” she said. 

Ng is among the faculty members who don’t agree with reducing credit requirements, especially in STEM fields, where she said the difference between taking 12 courses and seven is “huge.”

“You can’t have two tiers of programs,” Ng said. “I am a strong proponent of not changing the requirements.”

Jutton agrees with Ng—she wouldn’t have wanted to take a lesser load, she said. As she prepares to graduate, she has few regrets. Sure, another year may have afforded her a more robust social life, but she also found friendship and camaraderie among like-minded peers who were also on the fast-track to degree completion. Although Jutton will be younger than many of her graduate school cohort, she still feels prepared to move on.

“I think the biggest thing for me was finding supporters, like my career counselor and the faculty,” Jutton said. “I haven’t met someone who does not believe in me here and that was really important for me to be able to do the degree in three.”

Higher education has long debated its role in character development. Religious schools, secure in their subjectivity, have made producing people of good character part of their core mission. But for public universities serving diverse populations, the entire concept can be fraught, starting with the language itself. How are we defining character? And should values and principles be part of a student’s education? 

Arizona State University appears to have threaded the needle on character education with an initiative called “Principled Innovation” – a framework for ethical decision-making that can be used by individuals or in community settings. It is based on “pro-social” values that lead to defendable outcomes like “what’s good for humanity” without being overly prescriptive. Under the leadership of President Michael Crow, ASU has added Principled Innovation to the list of design aspirations that drive the university, calling it “the ability to create change guided by values and ethical understanding.”

Ted Cross is ASU’s Executive Director of University Affairs and Crow’s point person for the roll-out of Principled Innovation. He says character education is best understood as a reflective process that enables students to flourish – in a way that is flexible and individualized.

“We want people to improve themselves,” said Cross. “Positive psychology has a take on that; philosophy has its own angle. We packaged all of that into an inter-disciplinary approach that helps faculty, staff, and students ground decisions and actions in values and character.”

Informed by the Jubilee Centre’s Framework for Character Education in Schools at the University of Birmingham, Principled Innovation includes four domains of practice – Moral, Civic, Performance, and Intellectual – each of which encompass certain character “assets” or virtues meant to guide one’s ability to create positive change in the world. ASU’s institutional commitment is expressed through Principled Innovation as a guiding principle, while the practice of Principled Innovation is supported through a pedagogical approach, engaging tools and resources, communities of practice, and curricular and co-curricular activities. 

Building the Framework

The design lab for Principled Innovation was ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. In 2017, the dean of the college, Carol Basile, was concerned by the state of K-12 education systems and decided to change things from the inside out – through addressing the education workforce and teacher and leader preparation. She came to the conclusion that to do so, character education needed to be included. To understand how, she enlisted Cristy Guleserian, a colleague at the college who is now its Executive Director of Principled Innovation. 

“We asked ourselves, ‘What could it mean for a college of education at a public university to integrate a character education framework into the systems of teacher and leader preparation?’ said Guleserian. “In having these conversations, we realized it couldn’t just be integrated into a curriculum to teach future educators about character. It had to be our approach to everything we do and something that we embraced as a college community.” 

With this as their north star, Guleserian and her team worked intentionally with faculty, staff, students, and community partners and eventually incorporated the practices and assets of what would become Principled Innovation into everything they did, from fostering culture and environments to teaching, advising, and student services. But getting to an agreed-upon understanding of what all this would look like involved cultivating authentic relationships through a series of one-on-one discussions and all-college design sessions – a process Guleserian described as equal parts invigorating and challenging.  

“There was a lot of skepticism at first – a lot of questions about whose character, whose values, and whose virtues we were talking about. I remember spending about an hour going back and forth about one word,” she said.

In one of the sessions, a participant offered what would be a break-through in the log jam. “We need to ‘ASU-ize’ this,” he said. The group understood him to mean “co-create” a concept that more explicitly reflected ASU’s diverse community and well-publicized mission.  

“We recognized that innovation is at the core of what we do here at ASU and our charter holds us responsible for being inclusive for the well-being of the communities we serve. So the framing of Principled Innovation was born from that shared purpose,” said Guleserian.

The framework is intentionally flexible. In an essay for the book The Necessity of Character, ASU President Michael Crow and Ted Cross write, “By refusing to adhere to a single philosophical or religious worldview, ASU has made room for students to draw on their different backgrounds as they engage with our character education initiatives. Only by remaining flexible in this way have we been able to secure ‘buy-in’ across the university.”

At a research university known for outside the box thinking, Crow has made innovation part of ASU’s nomenclature. But the decision to include it in the title was more than just good branding. Principled Innovation proposes the notion that “just because you can innovate, doesn’t mean you should,” reflecting a growing national movement to infuse character into the critical actions of scientists and others in the innovation community.    

When asked if there could be “Unprincipled Innovation,” Cross said “definitely.” 

“It’s not enough to be innovative if you don’t innovate with purpose and principle. It’s not enough to help people learn how to make a good living if we’re not helping them learn how to live good lives, whatever that means to them,” he said. 

“It’s not enough to be innovative if you don’t innovate with purpose and principle. It’s not enough to help people learn how to make a good living if we’re not helping them learn how to live good lives.”

Principled Innovation in Practice

Building on the work of Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College (now called College for Teaching and Learning Innovation), Principled Innovation is currently practiced in ten colleges at ASU, including the W. P. Carey School of Business and the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, as well as the Office of the Provost and Educational Outreach and Student Services. All of this work uses the framework and assets for reflective practices and community practice that lead to positive change.  

“The framework asks, ‘What are some of the possible intended or unintended outcomes of the decisions we make and how can we mitigate some of the possible negative consequences before we take action?’” said Guleserian.

A good indication of how the framework may influence ASU’s pedagogy is the launch of the Principled Innovation Academy, which is housed in University College. The curricular program involving human-centered problem-solving methods and team pitch competitions has already engaged with 750 students.  

Cross calls the program “shark tank meets design thinking meets character education,” where students create and pitch ideas using the Principled Innovation framework. Last year’s winner was a career recommendation engine for students that works by asking them questions like, “What are your work values? What are your personal values? And how would that map to your career?” 

It is clear that the careful work that went into developing Principled Innovation at ASU helped propel it from a concept within one school to a major design principle for the entire university. But for advocates like Cross and Guleserian, the buy-in it has received at the country’s largest public university says something about the times we are in. 

“The U.S. is so deeply divided that we are talking past each other,” said Cross. “There’s a lot of anger and aggression and mistrust. But if we can engage multiple perspectives in the way we design and create things, the way we teach and collaborate, it helps us to develop environments of trust and belonging.”

When Guillermo Creamer got an unpaid internship in the office of the DC mayor a decade ago, he was thrilled. He found a live-in nanny position that would provide housing and took babysitting gigs on the weekend to pay for food and metro fares.

There was just one problem: the job had a dress code, and Creamer only had one suit – a tannish-green number that was neutral enough, but stood out among the blacks and blues. He had the suit dry cleaned often – at no small expense – but eventually a colleague took notice and called him out for wearing it every day.

“That was such an embarrassing day,” recalled Creamer, who now works as director of residential programs at a nonprofit in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he grew up, the son of South American immigrants.

The experience, and a subsequent unpaid internship in the US House of Representatives, led Creamer to co-found Pay Our Interns, a nonprofit with a mission to end unpaid internships, and the tagline “Experience Doesn’t Pay the bills.”

For Creamer, the work was personal. He has a younger sister and never wanted her to go through what he went through – to be ridiculed for not having proper business attire, he said.

But his opposition to unpaid internships is also philosophical. Requiring interns to work for free puts poorer college students, who often have to work to pay for college, at a disadvantage over wealthier ones, who tend to have family resources to fall back on, Creamer and other critics of the practice argue. Those who can’t forgo a paycheck (or cobble together side gigs, like Creamer) can miss out an internship that could set them on a path to financial stability.

“We want to create an equitable workforce pipeline, and internships are the beginning of that pipeline,” Creamer said.

Pay Our Interns decided to start with the Congressional internship program, arguing that a program that prepares future political leaders should be accessible to all students. It tailored its messaging to each political party, telling Democratic lawmakers that paying interns would help them diversity their workforce, and Republican ones that it would provide opportunity to members of the working class.  

“We want to create an equitable workforce pipeline, and internships are the beginning of that pipeline.”

The group had some success, convincing Congress and the White House to allocate money to pay their interns. It hoped that other employers would follow Washington’s lead.

Is Unpaid Unfair to Students?

Yet ten years after Creamer was shamed over his single suit, roughly one third of internships remain unpaid, with roughly one million students working for free each year, studies suggest. Millions more say they want an internship, but don’t get one, due to barriers such as insufficient supply, inadequate pay or the competing demands of work and school.

These statistics matter because participating in an internship – especially a paid one – has been shown to lead to stronger labor-market outcomes. Students who have an internship in college are less likely to be unemployed or underemployed five years after graduation than students who don’t, studies show. Both paid and unpaid interns receive more job offers, but paid interns get more, and have higher starting salaries, too.

Given the exclusionary nature of unpaid internships, some colleges have refused to include them in their job listings. Some have endorsed a recent campaign by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, dubbed “Unpaid is Unfair,” that calls on Congress to pass legislation requiring that internships be paid.

“It’s a way to democratize access to internships,” said Mary Gatta, the association’s director of research and public policy.

But not everyone is convinced that unpaid internships should be abolished. Those who argue for preserving them say that students are “paid in experience,” and that interns should be willing to exchange their labor for training and professional connections. They point out that some employers can’t afford to pay their interns and warn that ordering them to do so will cause some to cancel their internships altogether, deepening the existing shortage.

“It’s a terrible idea,” said Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University. “You’re cutting out one of the main ways people get training.”

Caplan sees great hypocrisy in colleges’ charging students for classes he considers pointless, while condemning companies for providing training for free.       “There’s a massive double standard,” he said. “Here at least students learn real stuff and they don’t even have to pay for it.”

Even some proponents of paying interns say it would be a mistake to outlaw unpaid internships as long as accreditors and licensing agencies require students in certain professional programs – like psychology and social work – to complete practicum training to graduate.

“While ethically on the right track, we shouldn’t even consider banning them until we figure out how to replace those unpaid positions,” said Matthew T. Hora, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founding director of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions.

Hora, who has conducted extensive research on unpaid internships, says he’s long been frustrated by colleges’ “unbridled embrace” of internships, and wishes they’d stop pushing them so hard.

“There just aren’t enough positions available and they’re out of reach of the vast majority of students,” he said.

NACE acknowledges that some employers aren’t in a position to pay their interns, and suggests that policy makers provide financial and other support to smaller for-profit, and nonprofit organizations. In the meantime, Gatta recommends that colleges work with community groups and chambers of commerce to identify funds that could support students with unpaid internships, such as foundation grants or federal work study dollars.

The Rewards and Challenges of Internship

The benefits of internships for both students and employers are well documented. By taking part in an internship, students gain insight into potential career paths, develop industry-specific skills, and build valuable professional networks. The practical, hands-on, experience gives them an edge in the job market – and the confidence and competencies they’ll need to succeed in it.

For employers, internships are a way to recruit and retain early-career talent. NACE’s annual survey of employers has consistently found that more than half of interns convert to full-time employees and that three quarters of those converts are still with the organization after a year, compared to just over half of non-intern employees.

Colleges confronting questions about their value can also benefit from student internships, research by the Strada Education Foundation suggests. It found that four-year college graduates who complete work-based learning are more likely to say their education helped them achieve their goals and was worth the cost.

Surveys show that students are well aware of the rewards associated with an internship. In fact, seventy percent of freshmen say they plan to take one. Yet fewer than half of students complete one by the end of senior year, and less than a quarter find a paid one, Strada’s research shows.

In 2023, an estimated 3.6 million students completed internships, but another 4.6 million wanted an internship and didn’t get one, according to the Business Higher-Education Forum.

That gap is at least partly due to the challenges employers face in creating and sustaining internships. These include not having appropriate work for interns or lacking the staff to supervise them, the Forum’s interviews with employers show.

Employers may also question whether an internship will provide a good return on their investment, said Nicole Smith, research professor and chief economist at the Center on Education and the Workforce, at Georgetown University. 

“There’s a cost in terms of the personnel and time invested, and you don’t know if the person will stay with the firm,” Smith said.

Given that uncertainty, employers may wonder “Am I training for me, or for my competitor?” Smith said.      

The available internship slots aren’t evenly distributed, either. Studies by NACE have found that women, Black, Hispanic and first-generation students are underrepresented in paid internships, while white, male and continuing generation students are overrepresented. There’s some evidence that students of color are over-represented in unpaid internships, though Hora cautions that it’s far from definitive.

The reasons for these disparities aren’t entirely understood, but there are a few prominent theories.

One popular explanation is that Black, Hispanic and first-generation students are more likely than other demographic groups to be classified as “low-income,” and can’t afford to give up a steady job for a short-term internship – even a paid one. In other words, they’re not applying in equal numbers.

 Another possibility is that first-generation students and students of color have less of the “social capital” needed to secure internships, which are frequently advertised through “whisper networks.”

And a third theory is that students of color and women are less likely to be paid because they cluster in majors associated with government and the non-profit sector, where paid internships are rarer.

Racial and gender gaps in internship participation may also reflect employers’ recruiting practices. If companies are drawing candidates from colleges that disproportionately enroll wealthier and white students, they’re less likely to end up with a racially- and socio-economically diverse applicant pool.

Yet even as students struggle to secure internships,  one in three employers say some of their slots are going unfilled.

That disconnect may be due to poor marketing on the part of employers, or to a mismatch between what companies are seeking and what students have to offer. In the Business Higher Education Forum’s interviews with employers, some companies said they couldn’t find candidates with the qualifications they wanted, according to Candace Williams, its director of regional initiatives.

Bringing the Bargaining Power         

So what can be done to broaden access to internships – and to paid internships, in particular?

Requiring employers to pay their interns, as NACE and others have proposed, could help diversify the applicant pool, making internships possible for more low-income students.

But with Trump and other business-friendly Republicans on the verge of controlling both the White House and Congress, a ban on unpaid internships isn’t likely to pass anytime soon.

Meanwhile, a growing number of colleges are setting aside funds for stipends to support students in unpaid internships. A recent survey by NACE found that more than a third of institutions now offer such stipends.

Karen Garcia, a junior at the University of Wisconsin whose family immigrated to the US from Mexico six years ago, used the $1,000 she received through her college’s “SuccessWorks” program to buy a coat and dressier shoes for her summer 2024 internship at the Department of Corrections. The money also helped cover gas for the car she used to get to the job, where she helped out on cases involving Spanish speakers. Without the grant, she said, “I would have had to lean on my parents, and they don’t earn that much money.”

Yet competition for colleges’ limited funds can be fierce, and only two percent of colleges provide the aid for any or all unpaid internships, the survey found. And while subsidy programs are an efficient way to get money to students, they often aren’t sustainable, especially if they rely on grants or alumni donations.

Recognizing this, some colleges are exerting pressure on employers to pay their interns, threatening to drop their “preferred employer” status, said Laura Love, who leads the work-based learning agenda at Strada.

“Colleges may have more bargaining power and influence than they think,” Love said.

At George Mason University, Saskia Campbell, executive director of university career services, uses data to persuade employers to pay her students. She shows them how pay increases the quality and diversity of the applicant pool and points to what competitors are paying their interns. She tells them they’ll get “more dedication and focus” from their interns if they’re not juggling a paid job on the side.

While some employers seem swayed by her descriptions of the financial strain students are under, “a lot of times it requires making the business case for them,” Campbell said.

If an employer says they don’t have the budget to pay their interns, she’ll push for “something is better than nothing.”

Campbell says many employers mistakenly assume that academic credit is a reasonable alternative to pay. They don’t always register that “not only are they not getting paid – they’re actually paying for the experience.”

Still, the work of expanding paid internship can’t fall solely on colleges. Among the think tanks and advocacy groups that promote internships there’s a consensus that it will take employers, government, and colleges working together to grow the field. And achieving such collaboration won’t be easy, said Su Jin Jez, CEO of California Competes, which has conducted interviews with both colleges and employers.

Though all three parties value internships, they value it for different reasons, she said. Colleges may think that employers will respond to arguments that internships will diversify their workforce, for example, when they’re really just interested in sourcing the top entry-level talent.

That “misalignment in values,” mirrors differences in structure and culture that can make cooperation difficult, Jez said.

Moving beyond the Traditional Model

As companies and colleges navigate these challenges, they’re also experimenting with alternatives to the traditional internship model.

Among the innovations that have taken root are “micro-internships” –  short-term, paid assignments that provide many of the benefits of regular internships without the long-term commitment.

Micro-internships function as sort of speed-dating for students and employers, allowing each party to see if the other is a good match, said Jeffrey Moss, CEO of Parker Dewey, which pioneered the approach a decade ago. The company has partnerships with 800 colleges, he said.

Moss believes micro-internships level the playing field, allowing students who might not have family connections, a 4.0 GPA, or an elite-college pedigree the chance to prove themselves to a prospective employer. Their short-term nature also makes them a way for students to try out different professions, to find one that brings them a sense of purpose.

At the same time, colleges are finding ways to make on-campus work more meaningful. Under one new program, students working in on-campus jobs at The University of New Hampshire can opt into a professional development program that offers regular meetings with a supervisor and the opportunity to earn micro-credentials in skills like communication and leadership.

Gretchen Heaton, associate vice provost of career and professional success and high-impact practices, said the program teaches students to articulate the skills they’ve gained through on-campus employment.

“Students often believe that unless it’s a ‘real job,’ it shouldn’t go on the resume,” Heaton said. “This is a way for students to talk about value in a way employers will understand.”

At Clemson University, the longstanding University Professional Internship and Co-op (UPIC) program matches students with paid positions submitted by faculty and staff, then links their work to a series of career competencies.

The program not only increases students’ odds of having a job when they graduate, but also aids in retention, according to O’Neil B. Burton, executive director of Clemson’s Center for Career and Professional Development.

“Our first-gen and Pell-eligible students don’t have to take a waitressing jobs or clerk at a mini mart. They can work on campus for somebody who recognizes that their class work comes first,” Burton said. “That can make the difference between being able to stay in school and persist to graduation and having to drop out and work.”

Guillermo Creamer, for his part, never finished college. He dropped out of American University a year shy of graduating because he couldn’t manage the tuition, he said. Pay Our Interns, the organization he helped create in 2016, has been dormant since its co-founder and executive director Carlos Mark Vera stepped down a little over a year ago.

Creamer said funders have shifted their attention away from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as opposition to DEI continues its march on higher education. For now, he believes the best place for Pay Our Interns to be is on the sidelines, monitoring the moves of the incoming administration.

But Creamer said he and his organization haven’t given up on ending unpaid internships and will spring into action if anything threatens the gains they’ve made so far.

“You can’t pay the rent with ‘experience,’” said Creamer. “Unpaid internships are an inequitable injustice.”