At the Intersection of Work and School: Internships and the Liberal Arts

Abstract

Internships are a recently burgeoning phenomenon. The number of students in the United States completing internships rose from 41% in 2004 to 61% percent in 2007 ("More" 2008). As internships have grown in popularity, so too has media coverage of them. A content analysis of the term "internship" 1 appearing in American newspapers in the last thirty years reveals that the majority of newspaper coverage of internships has occurred in the last five years: 16.6% of the articles are from 1980 to 1999, 29.8% occurred in the years between 1999 and 2004, and a whopping 53.5% were written since 2004. Additionally, universities' career centers are incorporating information about internships into their repertoires. Some colleges are creating faculty positions to directly address internships; Wesleyan University is planning to inaugurate a Director of Internships in 2010. In Europe, the internship has even become a hotly contested political issue. In 2004, students from several organizations (DGB Jugend Students @ Work, Génération précaire, Fairwork, Generation Praktikum, EPSA, and Generazione 1000) representing five countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Austria and Italy) united under the umbrella group Generation Precarity. This organization identified itself as "represent[ing] young people who face difficulties (e.g. unfair internships) when it comes to access to the European labour market" and presented a petition to the European Parliament in November 2007 ("Presentation" nd). In France, the battle ended in 2006 with the passage of the Charter of Student Internships in Business that delineated the exact nature of the internship as well as the legal responsibilities of the student, of the internship-offering organization and of the supervising professor ("Charte" 2006). Yet in the United States, the internship remains largely uncontested and has to be the subject of critical commentary. The existing literature in sociology that discusses internships is limited to pedagogical concerns. Some sociologists consider internships as a tool to pre-professionalize the undergraduate sociology major, noting that many sociology undergraduate students enter the business world. Internships are a way for undergraduate sociology programs to prepare their students for careers that do not require

The Price of Unpaid Internships

“…This decentralized system, known as "Education in the Field," created a considerable extra workload for individual faculty members, many of whom did not feel comfortable validating certain internships, especially those in the for-profit sector, as intellectually engaging experiences worthy of educational credit. In her study of Wesleyan University, Valentino (2010) found that professors from departments with less vocational application, such as Art History and German Studies, were more willing to offer students credit for internships, whereas faculty from the Economics and Film departments firmly refused to grant students credit for internships.…”

“…Through emphasizing its underpinning within the "liberal arts tradition of cultural, historical, and formal analysis," Wesleyan's Film department distinguishes itself from vocationally oriented film programs and reaffirms its high status (Film Studies). Valentino (2010) posited that faculty from disciplines like Film that are perceived as applicable to specific professional careers must spend a lot of energy socializing students into a liberal arts vision of these majors, characterized by noninstrumentality and non-substantiveness. She defines substantivism as "a cumulative process of capital acquisition," and instrumentalism as "the pragmatic function of education as a means to an end" (Valentino 2010: 5).…”

“…Bourdieu (1984) establishes that the general curriculum adopted by liberal education institutions reflects elite resistance to rationalization and codification of knowledge, and "an inclination and aptitude for practice without a practical function" (54). Based on Bourdieu's (1984) discussion of the non-substantive and non-instrumental aesthetic disposition of elite universities, Valentino (2010) argues that Wesleyan departments such as Film refused to accredit internships through the Education in the Field system because they viewed ! "*!…”

“…These remarks could be seen as an effort to counter the threat to ineffable, liberal learning posed by internship accreditation, by framing internships in accordance with the institution's liberal arts mission. Valentino (2010) documents the proliferation of the "service ideal" at elite universities after higher education became massified with the creation of land-grant state universities, the cooperative education movement, and the community college movement. As postsecondary education became more accessible, Valentino (2010) argues that elite schools sought to distinguish themselves and maintain superior status through incorporating community service into academic study, in order to signify !…”

“…I add that within the competitive realm of elite universities, students themselves have appropriated the ideal of community service into an instrumental form of tradable currency, which they can use to saturate their resumes and distinguish themselves when applying for jobs. Valentino (2010) argues that the codification of knowledge that ensued alongside expanded access to higher education further threatened the status of elite schools. In response, these colleges adopted liberal education as the basis for their curricula, which involves exploring many areas of knowledge instead of training for a specific career.…”