The internship economy is broken — here’s how to fix it

Members of the class of 2026 are graduating into what the National Association of Colleges and Employers is calling the worst hiring environment since the start of the pandemic.

Indeed, more college graduates are accepting unpaid internships than at any point in the last decade as the entry-level job market tightens around them. Companies are pulling back on early-career hiring as AI eliminates roles that previous generations used to build foundational skills. Internships are converting to full-time offers at the lowest rate in five years.

The policy reflex, understandably, has been to push employers to offer more internships. With internship access among the strongest predictors of long-term earnings and economic mobility, that instinct is not wrong.

But supply alone is not the answer. In truth, the internship is a limited instrument for a universal problem. Internships are often unpaid, concentrated in a handful of expensive cities, and gated by social capital.

As a result, the students who stand to gain the most from these experiences are also the ones least able to chase them across the country on their own dime. Instead, institutions should fold real work experience into the college experience itself.

Medicine learned this lesson more than a century ago. In 1889, William Osler, a physician from Ontario, became the first “physician-in-chief” of the newly opened Johns Hopkins Hospital and built something that had arguably never existed in American........

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