Internships as a High-Impact Practice: Some Reflections on Quality

Before joining AAC&U, I worked at a large university as a program director and counselor in career services, focusing much of my time on helping students identify their interests, figure out the connections between their academic majors and future careers, and test out these interests and connections experientially, most commonly through internships. The beauty of internships is that they can serve different purposes for different students. For those students just beginning to figure out their choice of major and career interests, an internship can help them to become aware of the many different kinds of organizations comprising "the world of work," build early professional experience, and sometimes discover what they don't want to do. For those students who are clearer about their career interests and academic pursuits, an internship can help them apply what they are learning in "real world" settings, gain more substantial professional experience, and begin to develop a network of people in fields that interest them. For both types of students, internships can challenge them to take an active role in charting both their short-term and long-term plans. Following an internship, some students add a second major or use their elective credit to complete a certificate or minor. Some change their majors completely Regardless of the paths students eventually take, internships can help students understand in a profound way that college is a time to explore their interests, clarify their values, and test their knowledge and skills in new settings. This is the ideal scenario, anyway. It is true that for a number of the students I worked with, internships provided a high-impact learning experience that integrated learning and real-world experience. At the same time, I also met many students who landed in my office precisely because their internships lacked direction and meaningful work. These students, frustrated and disappointed, began to view internships quite cynically as "resume fillers" and "door openers" that needed to be completed in order to land a job after graduation. What made these experiences so different? What makes an internship, as an experiential activity, high impact - or not? WHAT MAKES A PRACTICE HIGH-IMPACT? The 2008 report High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, published by AAC&U as part of its LEAP intiative, sparked a great of deal of interest among college and university leaders looking to increase student success. In the report, author George Kuh uses data from the National Survey of Student Engagement to demonstrate the positive impact of a set of educational practices on student engagement and success. The practices are familiar to most campus leaders: first-year experiences, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/ global learning, service learning, community-based learning, and capstone courses and projects. Rounding out the list is internships. Kuh's argument is that as long as these practices remain marginal to the whole curriculum, there will be insufficient breadth to reach all students and insufficient depth to help students become more sophisticated in their learning over time. His message for increasing student success is simple: "make it possible for every student to participate in at least two high-impact activities during his or her undergraduate program, one in the first year, and one taken later in relation to the major field" (Kuh 2008). Yet there is another, equally important message in Kuh's report, and it relates to the quality of these experiences. In the report, Kuh identifies six common elements across the practices that - when employed - make the practices high impact: They are effortful. High-impact practices "demand that students devote considerable time and effort to purposeful tasks [and] require daily decisions that deepen students' investment in the activity as well as their commitment to their academic program and the college. …