Raising internship participation: the levers administrators actually control

The case for internships is settled. Students who complete one overwhelmingly say it prepared them for work — 94%, in our State of Higher Ed 2026 research — and the NSLS has argued at length that campuses can no longer treat them as optional.

This piece is about the part that comes after agreeing. Only 19.4% of undergraduates have had an internship. If you accept the premise and want to move that number on your campus, three mechanisms do the work — and none of them is an awareness campaign.

Why awareness campaigns don’t move it

The instinct is to promote career services harder. The data says promotion isn’t the constraint.

84.3% of students already know their school offers career services. Of those, only 46% have ever used them — which means just 38.8% of all undergraduates have engaged with something they already know exists. Awareness is high and conversion is low, so more awareness buys very little.

The students furthest from an internship are the ones a campaign reaches least: first-generation students, commuters, part-time and working students, and anyone without a family network already inside a profession. They aren’t unaware. They lack a path.

Lever one: set a participation target and report it

An internship rate that nobody owns is a statistic. An internship rate with a number attached to it becomes a resourcing decision.

Pick a target, publish it, and report against it on the same cycle as retention and completion. The target doesn’t have to be ambitious to be useful — its job is to move internships out of the category of things that happen when a student is resourceful and into the category of things the institution is accountable for.

Two things make this work in practice. Define participation before you measure it, so credit-bearing placements, co-ops, practicums, and paid internships are counted consistently year over year. And disaggregate the number: an overall rate that looks acceptable often hides a first-generation or commuter rate that doesn’t.

Lever two: build pipelines, not postings

A job board is a list. A pipeline is a relationship with an employer who expects your students every term and knows what they can do.

Pipelines are more work upfront and dramatically cheaper to sustain, because the same conversation produces placements repeatedly. They also solve the quality problem that postings can’t: an employer who has taken your students before will take a student who interviews imperfectly.

The practical unit here is a small number of deep partnerships rather than a long list of shallow ones. Local government, health systems, school districts, and nonprofits are usually more accessible than national employers and more willing to build something recurring.

Lever three: facilitate the placement, don’t just advertise it

52.5% of degree-earners who had an internship got help from their college or university to land it. Institutional help is not a marginal factor — for roughly half of the students who get there, it’s the reason.

Facilitation is unglamorous and specific: embedding placements into a course or program so enrollment is the application, holding seats with partner employers, covering the transportation and unpaid-time costs that quietly disqualify working students, and treating the application itself as something the campus does with the student rather than something it advises them to go do.

Note the mismatch worth checking on your own campus: 62.4% of administrators say their students have a lot of internship opportunities, while under a fifth of students have one. Opportunity that students can’t convert reads, from the administrator’s chair, like sufficiency.

Where a leadership program fits

Experiential leadership programs help on both ends of this. They give students something to point to before their first internship — structured, documented work with peers and a real project — and they build the durable skills that make a student worth taking a chance on.

They can also generate placements directly. At Coastal Carolina University, NSLS members ran placements with the United Way of Horry County on a phonemic-awareness initiative in local schools, developing professional skills while doing work the community needed. That’s a pipeline the chapter built itself; how CCU built that chapter covers the mechanics.

The short version

Internship participation responds to targets, pipelines, and facilitation. It does not respond to being advertised more energetically to students who already know. If your campus wants a different number next year, the levers are institutional — which is the good news.