President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness announced commitments from 45 industry leaders–including American Express, AT&T, Boeing, Dell, Facebook, General Electric, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Sprint Nextel, Sunoco, and Xerox–to double available engineering internships in August, U.S. News reports. The more than 6,000 new internships, according to the council, will be part of an effort to address a shortage of engineers in the country by providing “opportunities for hands-on, technical job experience.” With an extremely competitive job market facing them when they graduate, engineering majors–as well as students in a variety of other areas of study–choose to supplement their coursework with internships, which give them an opportunity to get out of the classroom and into real-life work situations…
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Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
Opinion: Unpaid interns, complicit colleges
On college campuses, the annual race for summer internships, many of them unpaid, is well under way, says Ross Perlin for the New York Times. But instead of steering students toward the best opportunities and encouraging them to value their work, many institutions of higher learning are complicit in helping companies skirt a nebulous area of labor law. Colleges and universities have become cheerleaders and enablers of the unpaid internship boom, failing to inform young people of their rights or protect them from the miserly calculus of employers. In hundreds of interviews with interns over the past three years, I found dejected students resigned to working unpaid for summers, semesters and even entire academic years–and, increasingly, to paying for the privilege…
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