Bailey, T., Hughes, K., & Barr, T. (1998). Achieving scale and quality in school-to-work internships: Findings from an employer survey (MDS-902). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.

CONCLUSIONS

The analysis in this report suggests that many of the employers in these areas are already participating in work-based learning programs. According to our data, a substantial minority of employers, especially the larger employers, already provide internships, although our estimate of about a 25% participation rate is probably higher than a national participation rate would be. The programs that we have studied have been able to recruit an adequate number of employers and in some cases have been able to sustain a high number of participants for many years. Moreover, for the most part, these have not been in the traditional youth employing sectors and occupations--that is, service occupations in the retail sector.

Furthermore, participation in these programs does seem to be associated with firm size, in that larger firms are more likely to participate. Participation is also associated with a cluster of progressive human resources and training practices, but the significance of the training variable disappears when size is included in our probit model. Still, this suggests that employer recruitment may become easier if progressive human resources practices spread, even if participation itself is not necessarily in the direct short-term interest of employers. Not only are firms that use these practices more likely to participate, but there is evidence that they provide higher quality internships. Public sector employers are also more likely to participate, and do well on the quality measures.

The data do suggest that the most important motivation for participation remains philanthropic, although a strong minority of firms do report that bottom-line oriented reasons are the most important motivations for their participation. The importance of a philanthropic emphasis is supported both by answers to direct questions as well as the pattern of characteristics in the comparison of participating and nonparticipating firms. While these motivations have clearly carried these programs a long way, firms in the nonparticipating sample indicate that they would need more bottom-line oriented arguments to convince them to join up.

There is also evidence that firms tend to provide higher quality programs (at least as indicated by our measures) when they expect the interns to stay at the firm. Although these types of internships are better on all of the quality measures, sometimes the differences are not statistically significant. Internships with firms that emphasize philanthropic motivations score lower on the quality measures based on training time, while they score higher on the intensity measure.

This analysis has several implications for future research and program development. We clearly need more comprehensive analyses of the costs and benefits of participation in school-to-work internship programs. It will become increasingly important to have good data and arguments to support the claim that participation is in the interest of the firm. The recent set of eight case studies of the costs and benefits of participation by the National Employer Leadership Council and the American Society of Training and Development (Bassi et al., 1997) is a step in the right direction but more of this type of work is needed. As programs grow, appeals to community service will be less and less effective. It also follows that program policies that reduce the cost to employers and facilitate participation will become increasingly important. But this runs the risk of promoting excess selectivity for interns and barring many students who might particularly benefit from internships from higher quality opportunities.

The growth of these programs and the wide variation in the educational value of work-based learning experiences suggest that it is time that program developers pay more attention to the quality of internships. First, we need better measures of quality. Although we have used four measures of program quality they do not measure the content or outcomes of the experience. A fundamental problem is a lack of good conceptualizations of what an internship should provide. Our analysis provides some evidence that firms that take the interns more seriously (through expecting them to stay with the firm) do provide higher quality experiences. Internships appear to work best, at least according to these measures, if they are tied more directly to work preparation rather than educational preparation. On the other hand, our indicators do not measure the effect of internships on academic learning. Employers (and indeed educators) probably do not have a good sense of how the work-based learning experience contributes to the interns' education, broadly defined, so employer-reported measures of quality cannot be expected to capture these aspects of the experience.

This simply reinforces the argument for better conceptions of internship quality. Indeed, the school-to-work community has only started to confront the issue of work-based learning quality. Program operators have been reluctant to push the issue of quality because of difficulties in recruiting employers, but our data suggests that already a substantial number of employers are providing internships. Given the current levels of participation, program operators appear to have an opportunity to shift some of their focus from recruitment to quality. Moreover, there is no reason to conclude yet that research and experimentation with work-based learning will not lead to the development of approaches that will have both strong educational value and be practical in a wide variety of different employment environments.

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