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Summer internship season is in full swing. Across the country, college students have temporarily settled into cubicles, lab benches and Slack channels, ready to get the “real-world” experience that their colleges have promised will launch their careers.
For many of them, it will. Internships deliver tangible benefits in skills, networks and employment outcomes. But consider what else interns are sometimes asked to absorb. Earlier this year, the English football club Southampton was expelled from the Championship playoffs after admitting to spying on rival teams’ training sessions. At the center of the scandal was an intern sent to film opponents in secret. “I didn’t really have an option and wasn’t provided an opportunity to say no,” the intern reportedly said. “I was an intern and was doing what I was told.”
His words should ring in the ears of every educator who promotes internships. They capture something I have come to understand through my research on college interns: An internship’s most consequential lessons are often not the ones listed in the learning agreement.
The Southampton case is dramatic, but the underlying pattern is not unusual. A growing body of research documents how interns experience various forms of unfair practices at work, including sexism aimed at women in STEM internships, microaggressions targeted at racially minoritized interns and the normalization or even glorification of unpaid and underpaid labor. Too often, enduring these trials—and absorbing their implicit lessons—is treated as the price of admission to a career.
In fact, as my research has shown, exposure to such injustices is pervasive. All the participants in my recent study about injustice at their internship sites told me about things that felt “weird” or “off.” These included accommodations for a colleague with a disability that were perpetually “being planned,” pressure to volunteer unpaid hours being framed as active engagement and comments that one student called “borderline” racist.
The students described these as subtle practices embedded in everyday routines. They found the injustices hard to report and shared that they were normalized by senior workers. The interns, most of them young adults still forming their professional identities, were unsettled by the gap between what they believed the workplace should be and what it really is. But they were not sure what to do because of the subtlety of their experiences.
Here is the part that should concern educators most: When students tried to make sense of these experiences, college educators—internship coordinators, career advisers, academic advisers or faculty advising students’ internship experiences—were almost never the people that students reached out to for support.
There are understandable reasons for this. Many internships operate entirely outside of college oversight, so students see their campuses as irrelevant to what happens at work. But even when internships are connected to academic programs, students hesitate. As learners, they are encouraged to reflect openly on difficult experiences. As workers, they have absorbed the folk wisdom that professionals never speak negatively about their employers. This pressure is especially acute for interns, who may depend on those very supervisors for the recommendations that open doors to their first jobs.
So, most stay silent when college educators ask them to share honest feedback about their internships. Instead, they process what they have witnessed in private, with close friends and family, and even with anonymous peers online (such as on TikTok’s #intern page). They compare notes and reassure one another that it “could be worse.”
Of course, that informal support matters. But most troubling is that, after working through their confusion, many students conclude that staying quiet in the face of unfair treatment is simply what professionals do. Students in my study frequently told me that they would carry that silence into their careers after college. That they’d “brush it off” if mistreated again, start “quiet quitting” and look for another job.
But there’s a lot that colleges can do to support students, intervene in these injustices and guide students to imagine how, as workers, we can make the world of work a better space for all of us.
To start, before haphazardly scaling internships, colleges should take up their role in helping students name and challenge workplaces’ informal curricula: that workplace injustice is “normal,” that endurance or silence is professionalism and that speaking up is naïve. Higher education has striven to cultivate critical thinking, ethical reasoning and civic courage: Rushing to get more college students into internships that quietly encourage resigned silence works against these very ideals.
Universities should also create spaces where learners can openly discuss their concerns about their workplace and its culture. To enable that kind of learning, college educators supporting students’ going through internships can create reflective spaces that are clearly separated from reporting.
When institutions structure internship reporting as formal evaluations, students frequently assume their feedback will be disclosed to employers. This anxiety is compounded when internships are credit-bearing, as students perceive that their academic advancement depends on the nature of their report. To encourage honest reflection, educators must reassure students that the spaces to share concerns are decoupled from any potential traceable grievance mechanisms.
At the same time, college educators should help students connect their individual experiences to those of a broader community of interns. In my study, many interns insisted on keeping their experience private, but they were far more willing to challenge unfairness when it affected someone they cared about, especially other interns. Asking students to consider how they would respond if the same thing happened to a friend or a younger mentee can reveal structural patterns and cultivate solidarity rather than isolated coping strategies.
College educators can also guide students to reflect on and challenge unfair practices that are normalized at work. Explicitly lowering the bar for what counts as injustice by inviting students to name experiences that felt weird, awkward or uncomfortable can help them recognize that discomfort as a meaningful experience, articulate concerns they might otherwise dismiss and begin to see individual episodes as part of broader workplace patterns.
Finally, college educators should share success stories of challenging workplace injustice. As mostly younger adults and emerging professionals, college interns can feel discouraged to speak up. Sharing real-life cases that achieved justice for emerging professionals can help students learn how to break silences and reshape the world of work toward a more fair and just space.
Interns occupy a precarious in-between position: not quite students, not quite employees. That’s what makes them vulnerable both to experiencing injustice and to standing silently beside it as it happens. And it’s why they need guidance from trusted educators to figure out what to do with what they see.
