ACCESS INACTION:
Helping more students afford eye-opening, hands-on internships BY SUSAN ROSENBERG
ON A VISIT HOME TO BROOKLYN after starting her freshman year at Skidmore, Clarivel Gonzalez ’16 took her 7-year-old sis- ter on a walk around her neighborhood. It was good to be home, she recalls, but “I was horrified—there was so much lit- ter and garbage!” At her green-minded high school she’d helped build a garden, and during the autumn she’d grown ac- customed to Skidmore’s lawns and Saratoga’s well-heeled neat- ness. Now she was struck by the evidence of environmental neglect in her neighborhood.
As soon as she returned to campus, Gonzalez dropped a course in order to add an environmental studies course. “I real- ized I wanted to learn more about these issues and be able to help my community,” she says. Now she’s an ES major and Spanish minor. Gonzalez’s interests and ambi- tions made her a strong candidate for an internship supported by the New World Foundation, which un- derwrites a placement at a New York City social-service agency and also policy and leadership training through the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network. For Gonzalez, the program helped pave her path to effective civic engagement. For Skidmore, it broadens the path to
port counted about 1.5 million interns being hired each year, more than half of them into unpaid positions. Where does that leave students who can’t cover their living expenses with out a salary, or who rely on summer-job earnings to help pay for the next year of college? Newsweek says, “The implications are po- tentially life-changing,” because skipping a summer internship can mean missing out not just on practical experience but on the professional networking and relationships that career spe- cialists credit as the primary factor in landing some 70% of jobs nowadays.
An
About.com entry on internships by Penny Loretto, asso- ciate director of Skidmore’s Career Development Center, ac- knowledges the frustration of finding “the perfect internship” and then discovering that it’s un- paid. It’s not that students refuse to work for nothing, she says; most are more than willing, because the per- sonal and professional benefits are worth it. Her advice is to look for grants or college funding.
BRENDIS GONZALEZ ’16 AND CLARIVEL GONZALEZ ’16
transformative experiences for students who otherwise couldn’t afford them.
BRIDGING COLLEGE AND CAREER
On-the-job experience during college is now viewed as “an es- sential rite of passage into a fiercely competitive job market,” Newsweek reported a few years ago. During the 1990s and 2000s, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the proportion of students taking internships leapt from 9% to more than 80%. One reason is that job applicants with internship experience have a better chance of getting an offer and typically start with a higher salary.
Problem is, many companies have cut back on paid intern- ships and now offer only unpaid ones. A recent USA Today re-
12 SCOPE SPRING 2014
Closing the internship participa- tion gap between those who can af- ford an unpaid summer and those who can’t is very much a part of Skidmore’s strategic plan. It has been raising funds for the SEE-Beyond in-
ternships with their substantial $4,000 stipends. And now the New World Fellowships, also $4,000, are popular in Skidmore’s Opportunity Program, which enrolls and supports ambitious students whose prior academic or financial situation would put Skidmore out of reach otherwise. (The program is one of three covered in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. A research report on student-development programs, the book concludes that “Skidmore has moved beyond a focus on admissions, re- tention, and completion to a more integrated emphasis” on providing every student with equal access to all co-curricular and academic opportunities.)
As one of the college and university presidents invited to a White House summit on higher education access last winter, Skidmore President Philip Glotzbach pledged to expand Skid-
ERIC JENKS ’08
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