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Wolfgram, M., Vivona, B., & Akram, T. (2021). On the intersectional amplification of barriers to college internships: A comparative case study analysis. Harvard Educational Review, 91(4), 457-481.
Hora, M., Wolfgram, M., Chen, Z., & Lee, C. (2021). Closing the doors of opportunity: A field theoretic analysis of the prevalence and nature of obstacles to college internships. Teachers College Record, 123 (12), p.
Zhang, J. & Hora, M.T. (2021). Who are the unpaid interns? Preliminary findings from 13 institutions in the College Internship Study. Data Snapshot #1. Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions. University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Internships are currently one of the most “high-impact” practice in higher education, largely because
the research literature has shown that they are positively associated with personal, academic and career outcomes (Garcia et al., 2016; Ocampo et al., 2020; Pan et al., 2018; Routon & Walker, 2019). Given the significance of internships in helping college students “open the doors” to their first post-graduate job, over time there have been increasing numbers of students who participate in a college internship, even if they have to work for free (Gardner, 2010; Rogers et al., 2019).
While unpaid internships may provide students opportunities to explore the world of work and may bring them some form of social and cultural capital (Leonard et al., 2016), they have been widely critiqued with respect to their legality, general equality, economically discrimination, and racism (Gardner, 2010; Holford, 2017). For example, lawsuits against the film industry charged that they used unpaid interns to do the work of full-time employees (Gardner, 2016), a scenario that confirmed the fear of some observers that an unpaid internship could represent an exploitative labor situation (Curiale, 2009). Continue reading.
Hora, M. T., Chen, Z., Wolfgram, M., Chen, Z., & Rogers, S. (2020). Results from the College Internship Study at Tennessee State University. Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions.
Summary: This report includes findings from the first round of data collection (Spring 2020) at Tennessee State University (TSU) for The College Internship Study, which is a national mixed-methods longitudinal study of internship programs conducted by the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions (CCWT) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison). The findings are based on an interdisciplinary sample of students who took an online survey (n = 252), interviews with students who have and who have not had an internship experience (n = 9), and interviews with career advisors, faculty, and employers (n = 7). We would like to thank TSU for allowing our research team to conduct this study with your students, faculty, and community members, and hope that our findings are useful as you work towards improving internships and work-based learning for your students. As our research moves into its second year, we will focus on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the students, faculty and staff at TSU and employer partners with respect to internships and students’ overall experiences with the pandemic and its impacts on their studies and career goals.
Four research questions guide our study: (1) How many students are participating in internship programs, and does participation vary by student demographics, academic status, or life/employment situation? (2) What barriers exist for students to participate in internship programs? (3) What is the structure and format of internship programs? And, (4) How, if at all, is program structure and format associated with student satisfaction with their internships and their estimation of the value of the internship for their career development? In addition, given the timing of our interviews (Spring 2020), we also were interested in understanding TSU students’ experiences related to the COVID-19 pandemic.