How Would You Revolutionize Higher Education?

by Ariel L.

The last few centuries have seen a noticeable shift in ‘higher education.’ In the past, learning a profession usually meant several years living, working, and learning alongside a master in your field. Through this apprenticeship, you gained not only a hands on education, but the benefits of your mentor’s superior knowledge. Today, the four years it normally takes to earn a degree, are spent in a classroom. Though many of your classes pertain to your major, some may hold little or no relevance to a real life work situation. Your first real hands on experience in your profession may very well be your first day on the job. We’ve shifted from learning mainly through real life experience, to real life experience playing little or no role in our education.

While apprenticeships today are almost obsolete, they do have a modern day counterpart. The same ‘real life’ elements that made apprenticeships so valuable, can be found in today’s internships. Interns work alongside people in their field of interest, learning through observation and practical experience. So why aren’t internships a larger part of our education?

There are several reasons internships and the type of learning they provide play such a small role. Most of these reasons involve finances or the limitations that surround students earning college credits through internship. Internships are usually divided into two categories: academic and paid. Interns earning college credits are not usually paid. (Some colleges even require a credit earning intern be unpaid.) This arrangement often forces interns to choose between pay or credit. Unfortunately, whether an intern is paid or not, the usually have to pay their college for all credits earned. Many students “simply cannot afford to take part in unpaid internships.” If a student is required to be unpaid to earn credits, they must legally be considered an unpaid ‘trainee’ under the Fair Labor Standards Act. This means meeting several criteria, including the following: “The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees or students, and on occasion his operations may actually be impeded...” According to Business.Gov, “The basic principle behind a legal unpaid internship is simple- unpaid interns cannot do any work that contributes to a company’s operations. This includes any tasks that help you run your business, like documenting inventory, filing papers, answering e-mails, ect.” To earn credits, an unpaid intern is forced to sacrifice the ‘hands on experience’ that defines internship. On top of all this, internships only count towards a small portion of credits in a degree. Approximately ‘70% of interns receive 3-4 college credits’. How can higher education shift to a larger emphasis on real life experience if the real life experience counts for so little?

What can we do to overcome these hurdles? A solution to these problems may not be unattainable. What if you could earn more college credits through internships, still be paid, and therefore still be able to have hands on experience? www.geteducated.com recently released an article saying, “Corporations spend more time, money, and effort teaching adults than do all the colleges in America combined.” Recently these companies came up with a way to count this training as college credit. “Many large corporations...have subjected their training course to a special review process sponsored by the American Council On Education’s Program on Non-Collegiate Sponsored instruction (ACE/PONSI), known today as the CREDIT program. CREDIT is a program that allows no-collegiate educators...to have their in-house training courses reviewed by college assessors. ... If they find that individual courses are “college level,” they recommend that a certain number of college credits be routinely awarded for successful course completion. About half all regionally accredited colleges accept ACE recommendations for degree credit.” If an employer worked through this CREDIT program, or could somehow receive accreditation through one of the accrediting agencies recognized by the Council For Higher Education Accreditation, they could form internships with a higher credit value. ‘Hands on learning’ would be able to become a larger part of our educational experience.

Why would a business do this? Why go to such trouble to make internships an academically valuable part of higher education? What about the dilemma of paid versus unpaid? It’s possible that CREDIT or accreditation is the single answer to these questions. A recent report on internships stated, “Employers often decline to host interns, or expand an internship program because they anticipate it will cost them too much money. In particular they fear they will be unable to offer competitive compensation.” The average pay of an intern is $12.60 an hour, while some reach as high as $24 an hour. Some employers have chosen to consider college credits as a form of ‘compensation’ and therefore technically fulfill their obligation to ‘pay,’ while not having to pay monetarily. This is not considered a legal form of compensation according to current federal laws, but what if variation of this idea could be legal? What if an employer were able to give partial compensation through credits earned, paying the other portion in actual hourly wages? The intern would not be limited ‘trainee’ regulations, yet would not need to be payed as much as a normal employee would be. In this way employers gain the valuable benefit of an enthusiastic, young, ‘full working’ staff member, who has a real interest in their work, for less cost to them financially.

This solution benefits everyone: Employers save money, while gaining en employee with a real interest in what they are doing. A student who isn’t otherwise able to afford college, could earn a good portion of their degree through paid internships. The intern gains the benefit of working alongside their real life counterparts, and earning a larger portion of their degree without choosing between credits and pay. All of this enables ‘learning through practical life experience’ to again play a vital role in our system of higher education.

Ariel wrote this essay for the 2010 scholarship contest. Although she didn't win the Grand Prize, it was so good we gave her a complimentary $1000 CollegePlus! scholarship!