St. John’s County School District in St. Augustine, Florida, works with local employers to offer internships to high school students in 18 fields, including architectural design, cybersecurity, medical research, and robotics.

The American Heart Association’s approach to its internship program is to create intentionally designed experiences rather than a collection of activities.

Internship programs are about more than just getting quality hires in the door: Retention metrics reported in NACE’s 2026 Internship & Co-op Report demonstrate the long-term ROI of having a program.

The University of Colorado at Boulder’s on-campus internship program is designed to help departments reimagine student employment as a more intentional and developmental experience by embedding career readiness skills directly into student work.

Approximately one-half of employers responding to NACE’s 2026 Internship & Co-op Survey report that they provide financial relocation assistance to interns, a benefit that they say also boosts their experiential education programs.

Key metrics for internship programs—offer, acceptance, and conversion rates—all increased among 2024-25 interns compared to 2023-24 interns.

Employers expect to bring in 3.9% more interns in 2025-26 compared with 2024-25, according to NACE’s 2026 Internship & Co-op Report.

An important consideration for employers offering paid internships—an undertaking that should be performed annually—is setting intern salaries.

As we enter the new school and recruiting season, NACE is conducting a Fall Quick Poll. The focus of our poll is on two important issues– the impact the end of Affirmative Action is having on our work and state of unpaid internships.

When it comes to offering experiences that interns find beneficial, what are employers doing well and what can they do better? According to respondents to NACE’s 2025 Student Survey, interns valued their colleagues who were friendly and helpful and made the internship a good experience.

Uncertainty surrounds the use of artificial intelligence among university relations and recruiting professionals and, to a lesser extent, among career services practitioners.

Students embrace hands-on skills development through experiential learning and report that employers are helping them develop key skills they need as they prepare for the workplace.

In 2024, Protiviti created a PowerBI dashboard to holistically evaluate the performance of more than 300 of its interns and share the data with leadership teams to use when considering full-time offers.

Since the creation of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s Buckeye Pathways Summer Internship program five years ago, career readiness has been a central priority.

Launched in 2024, “V Teamer for a Day” is an in-person experience at several key Verizon hub locations designed to immerse potential interns in the company’s culture and develop a sense of belonging.

In response to a national and extensive industry workforce shortage, Garver’s recruitment team has crafted a dedicated university recruiting program that ultimately serves as a pipeline for eventual full-time employees.

Salas O’Brien clears common hurdles when trying to keep interns engaged during the academic year, such as being passive and assuming students will remember their internship experience without ongoing connection.

There are many strategies employers can use to maintain—and even strengthen—ties with their interns when they return to campus and throughout the academic year.

The Maximus Summer Internship Program is a mission-driven talent pipeline that advances workforce leadership and strategically engages with students to achieve excellent outcomes.

The employer winner of the 2025 NACE Technology Excellence Award, GM Financial's intern social media strategy tells the authentic story of the firm’s intern experience and grows its pipeline of students for internships and early career opportunities.

Offers to interns for full-time positions fell along with overall conversion rates even as acceptance rates rose, according to NACE’s latest internship benchmarks.

The small employer winner of the 2025 NACE Recruiting Excellence Award, heritage Moss Adams’ (now Baker Tilly) Summer Internship Experience is designed to build a strong pipeline of skilled career professionals who will elevate the profession and the firm.

In-person activities are the most widely used and effective means for recruiting interns, according to results of NACE’s 2025 Internship & Co-op survey.

Moving to skills-based hiring opens opportunity for a broader demographic of students to access positions where they otherwise would not meet the qualifications. Many employers include skills development in their internship programs to enhance their interns’ career readiness and bolster conversion.

More than 70% of organizations expect to increase or maintain intern hiring, according to NACE’s 2025 Internship & Co-op Report. However, overall intern hiring is expected to fall 3.1%.

To persist toward successful conversion of interns, organizations must not view engagement as a 10-week summer pursuit. Instead, engagement must gain momentum through recruiting and pre-internship, accelerate during the internship itself, and be maintained after interns return to campus.

Relocation assistance may be the secret sauce to attracting top-notch interns.

When students responding to NACE’s 2024 Student Survey were asked to identify the obstacles preventing them from participating in internships, their responses revealed they attributed their decision to a lack of time, concerns over pay, and scant opportunities.

There are several factors linked to the decision to convert for Class of 2024 graduating seniors, according to results of NACE’s 2024 Student Survey.

Hyster-Yale Materials Handling is developing a pre-onboarding program to engage and build excitement among its interns prior to their start date next summer.

Data suggest that providing interns with relocation assistance correlates to better conversion rates for organizations that hope to turn interns into full-time hires.

Disney provides resources to the College Fund to administer the latter’s scholarship program, called the Future Native Storytellers Program. Recently, a smaller group of program scholars was selected to receive additional enhancements to increase the awareness of opportunities at Disney for Native students.

This past summer, Arup expanded its career readiness programming for summer interns by working with its internal learning and development team to implement a series of competency-focused workshops.

Liberty Mutual has found that one of the most effective ways to maintain or strengthen connections with prior interns when they are on campus is to meet them where they are, such by hosting meetups, dinners, or coffee chats on or near campus.

The percent of graduating seniors who participated in an internship is the highest that NACE has recorded in the past six years, according to results of NACE’s 2024 Student Survey.

There are interesting data points from NACE’s 2024 Recruiting Compensation Report in terms of budgets, internship offers, and retention that provide insight into the operations and approaches of URR functions.

With professional pursuits, quality invariably outweighs quantity, so career services staff should work with students to find good fits rather than trying to meet arbitrary deadlines.

Global Atlantic Financial Group, the small employer winner of the 2024 NACE Recruiting Excellence Award, addressed a pressing need for increased diversity and innovation and a robust talent pipeline.

NACE is conducting a quick poll and would like your input to assess ways that campus recruiting may be impacted. Last spring, we saw increased campus protests and lockdowns in response to student activism. As we prepare for the fall semester and campus recruiting, there is a potential for increased campus unrest in response to global and national events (i.e. Presidential election, war in Middle East). This Quick Poll is intended to get an overall understanding of the ways university recruiters and campus career centers are preparing for possible campus unrest related to the recruiting process.

The conversion rate for interns fell, fueled by a lower offer rate. The lower rate could reflect lower-than-expected hiring needs or could signal an issue with the intern selection process.

Northwestern Mutual shifting the focus of its internship program to development of career readiness competencies seemed like a natural progression since the company was already focusing on themes similar to those identified by NACE’s competencies.

Landmark College, an institution exclusively for students who learn differently including those on the autism spectrum, champions a strengths-based model and gives students the skills and strategies they need to achieve their goals.

Winner of the 2024 Chevron Innovation Award, the Gregory S. Fehribach Center at Eskenazi Health empowers Indiana college students with physical disabilities to achieve equitable employment following graduation.

Hiring for internships is expected to remain stable this year, according to NACE’s 2024 Internship and Co-op Report. Overall, eight out of 10 employers taking part in NACE’s annual benchmark report expect to maintain (47.2%) or increase (32.2%) the number of interns they bring in for 2023-24 compared to the 2022-23 academic year.

Because Liberty Mutual Insurance hires hundreds of interns a year, it equips interns with a wide range of skills and has the skill profile of an intern closely align with its early career roles to prepare interns for potential future full-time roles.

Visa’s internship program is designed to build full-time conversion and provide an exceptional experience for incoming talent. Phill Haig, Visa’s director of early career programs, says Visa’s target conversion rate has been 70%.

Hourly wages for interns have kept pace with inflation, signaling the value of these programs to employers.

Interns who feel committed to the organization because they were well treated are 7.14 times more likely to accept an offer of full-time employment.

Some have the mistaken idea that credit means internship experiences can’t or shouldn’t be paid. Affecting all students but especially those struggling with finances, unpaid, for-credit internships require the student to pay for the credit and forgo a paycheck. Employers can and should pay their interns, regardless of whether the student gets academic credit for participating.

Visa has found that hiring diverse talent is easier to accomplish the earlier it can engage students and it helps create a network of brand evangelists who are able to advocate for Visa on campus.

The Williams Companies evaluates talent for internships based on the NACE Career Readiness Competencies, focusing on the competencies where it has seen gaps in its intern class.

Last year, Progressive Insurance achieved an intern conversion rate of 91%, far exceeding the overall conversion rate of 57.6% for 2021-22.

Due to their underrepresentation in the classroom and societal messaging around technology being a “masculine domain,” women in computer science often feel isolated and marginalized. A study demonstrates how women’s experiences in computing internships shape their future career decisions; the findings have implications for both career development professionals and employers who recruit entry-level talent.

Data provided by more than 2,300 bachelor’s degree-level graduating seniors who took part in NACE’s 2023 Student Survey demonstrate that systemic inequities continue to exist in internships—not only in terms of who takes part, but also in terms of who gets paid.

Internships can provide students with valuable professional skills but also a professional network, which can be even more valuable upon graduation.

Dominican University, a Hispanic-serving institution with 64% of students identifying as Latinx and located just outside of Chicago, launched its successful career development program in its Brennan School of Business in fall 2017.

The SPARK grant at Nazareth College is open to first- and second-year students to encourage and support early engagement in experiential learning.

The large-employer winner of the 2023 NACE Award for Recruiting Excellence, DISH’s “Recruit Once, Hire Twice” college recruiting process brings in top interns and works to convert them into full-time hires.

A new $1 million gift supporting career development at William & Mary will triple the number of students annually who can receive university funding for unpaid and underpaid internships.

Through its Experiential Learning Platform™, Saxbys builds individualized academic partnerships to open cafes that provide exceptional paid experiential learning opportunities for students.

The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Engineering Job & Internship Fair Tours were created to engage more first- and second-year students in job fairs and to reduce barriers to attendance.

Regardless of how employers ran their programs in summer 2021, the hybrid model is their favored modality for their 2021-22 internships, according to NACE’s 2022 Internship & Co-op Survey Report.

Internships provide employers an opportunity to identify talent early: Indeed, according to NACE’s 2019 Recruiting Benchmark Survey Report, nearly all respondents (94 percent) said it was very or extremely important to identify talent early through internships.1

NACE offers suggestions for getting the most out of your organization’s intern surveys.

Free downloads from the NACE Center: These studies examine how internships impact the development and initial career outcomes of college graduates.

Document aspects of your organization’s internship program on an ongoing basis to, among other things, help you clarify what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.

NACE offers best practices for internship programs that feed full-time hiring, including recommendations for work assignments, work arrangements, housing and relocation assistance, and program management.

Unpaid internships can put international students at risk of violating their immigration status.

What constitutes harassment? How are employers required to respond? What should employees do if they believe they are being harassed? Are unpaid interns protected?

Employers may require new hires and interns to sign restrictive covenants, such as noncompete, nonsolicitation, and/or nondisclosure agreements. Attorneys George Hlavac and Ed Easterly discuss the issues.

Although some recommend a student or new graduate volunteer to work unpaid to gain experience, it is illegal for-profit organizations to have “volunteers” perform work.

There are a number of laws and regulations governing internships, including whether an intern is classified as an employee. Others cover compensation-related issues—including whether an intern can be paid if they receive credit—workplace safety, employment agreements, and more.