Exploring online internships amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: Our Approach: The Internship Scorecard

This is the third of eight articles in this series. Click here to go to first article in this series. If you’re searching for a remote internship, go to our search results page that lists all of the remote internships and other entry-level jobs advertised on College Recruiter and then drill down as you wish by adding your desired category, location, company, or job type.

One of the primary goals of our broader research program on college internships is to problematize the  notion of an “internship” from a single, homogenous type of program to one far more varied in terms of  quality, purpose and activity. In a previous effort our team developed a framework for diagnosing, studying  and evaluating internships in a way that accounts for these varied features, which we called the Internship  Scorecard (Hora et al., 2020a). This framework conceptualizes internships as varying across three  categories: (1) prevalence, format and purpose, (2) quality and (3) equitable access.  

This approach varies from those of NACE (2018) and CAS (2018) in not articulating a set of criteria that  all internships must meet to be considered “legitimate” or of high-quality. Instead, our position is that  depending on the goals of each student and/or their academic program, and their level of maturity and  preparedness, the specific format and activities of an internship may vary. Consequently, no determinations  of program quality can be made solely on a program’s modality (e.g., online or in-person), duration or  activities, as each may or may not align with students’ unique goals for their experience. In addition, the  Scorecard approach centers issues of equity and accessibility, which are long-standing issues in the world  of internships where unpaid positions are inaccessible to working and/or low-income students, and also  can act as a gatekeeping mechanism that reproduces inequality and privilege.  

The Scorecard is intended to be adapted for different purposes and datasets, and in this study we adapted  the framework to capture key elements of online internships that were available from our survey. The factors that we report in this paper are as follows:

Table 2: Indicators from the Internship Scorecard used in this Study

In our study, we use a combination of indicators from the Internship Scorecard and key principles
of effective online internships, remote work, and digital learning (Table 1) to assess the quality and
effectiveness of the internships reported by students in our project. In moving beyond assumptions of
positive benefits either through mere participation in an internship or through unexamined assumptions of
value, we aim to move the conversation about online internships to a more evidence-based discussion of
prevalence, quality and equitable access.

— This is the third of eight articles in this series. Click here to go to next article in this series. This series of articles is courtesy of the University of Wisconsin (Madison) Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions (CCWT). To download the full report, go to http://ccwt.wceruw.org/research/technicalreports.html