The class of 2026 is entering what the National Association of Colleges and Employers describes as the most challenging hiring market since the early days of the pandemic. More graduates are settling for unpaid internships than at any point in the past decade, as companies scale back early-career hiring and artificial intelligence begins to replace the roles that once served as training grounds for new professionals. Meanwhile, the rate at which internships convert into full-time offers has fallen to a five-year low.
The natural policy response has been to pressure employers to expand internship offerings. Given that internship experience is one of the strongest predictors of long-term earnings and upward mobility, that instinct has merit. But simply increasing the number of internships will not solve the underlying problem. Internships are too often unpaid, clustered in a handful of expensive cities, and dependent on who you know rather than what you know.
Students who would benefit most from these opportunities are frequently the ones least able to relocate or work for free. The solution, according to a growing number of educators and workforce experts, is to integrate real work experience directly into the academic curriculum—making it a core component of earning a degree, not an optional add-on.
This is not a new idea. More than a century ago, Dr. William Osler, the first physician-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, pioneered a structured, supervised, and immersive training model for doctors. His residents literally lived in the hospital, and their education was tightly coupled with hands-on practice. That model worked not merely because of the internship itself, but because it was embedded in a broader system of licensing standards, academic rigor, and a shared understanding of what job readiness meant.
Other industries eventually borrowed the concept, but the growth of internships outside medicine was slow and inconsistent. A turning point came in 1947, when the Supreme Court ruled in Walling v. Portland Terminal Co. that a railroad company did not have to pay trainee brakemen because they were not considered employees under federal law. That decision opened the door to a wave of unpaid internships.
By the 1970s, college enrollment had surged, credential inflation had taken hold, and competition for entry-level jobs intensified. Unlike medicine, most industries lacked licensing boards or standardized definitions of competence. As a result, the quality and accessibility of internships varied wildly—and still do. Today, more than 40 percent of internships are unpaid, and fewer than half of college students complete a meaningful internship before graduation. The outcome is a K-shaped early career market: those with connections and financial resources thrive, while everyone else struggles.
Simply asking employers to post more listings will not close that gap. The divide begins long before a recruiter opens a requisition, and it hits hardest those who cannot afford to work for free or relocate for a summer. The stakes have only grown as employers increasingly treat work experience as the deciding factor in hiring decisions. A recent NACE survey found that internship experience is now the single most influential factor when choosing between two otherwise equally qualified candidates.
A college degree alone is no longer the differentiator it once was. The answer is to stop viewing work experience as something that happens outside of college and instead make it part of the academic journey itself. That means embedding real-world, employer-designed projects into the courses students already take, so that every graduate emerges with a portfolio of actual professional work. Colleges should treat work-integrated learning as core academic infrastructure, not an extracurricular activity.
Employers, for their part, should collaborate with institutions to bring real projects into the classroom rather than waiting to meet students at a career fair. This is the lesson Osler brought to medicine: training must be structured, supervised, and unavoidable on the path to a credential. Other industries lost sight of that principle somewhere along the way.
Work should be a standard part of every student's academic experience, not a privilege reserved for those with the right connections or the financial cushion to pursue it. Higher education needs to stop leaving the most valuable part of college to luck.
