Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 48
A leader who listens: Bunker Hill President Pam Eddinger reached out to underrepresented students to learn how her school's paid internship
program could better serve them.
six months doing paid work for employers in jobs that align with
their course work-and often receive full-time job offers from
those employers after graduation. " We saw that the ability to
learn in the classroom and then get practical experience was a
very powerful combination, " Swanson told me. " When you get
that link-when you're working and you're getting an education-the
education becomes more valuable to you because you
see the applicability to your job. "
By the time Eddinger got to campus, Learn and Earn was
gaining momentum and a handful of students had already gone
on to land positions with the companies they interned for. During
her meeting with Swanson, Eddinger promised to double
the size of the program to signal her support for it. At the time,
roughly 30 students a year were participating. It took until 2019,
when the college added two staff members to coordinate the internships,
for the number to increase to 60. But the lag wasn't
just a personnel issue. Administrators had set up an arduous
screening process that sometimes included up to four interviews
before a student would be placed with an employer. " We were so
careful about wanting to send students who would succeed out
in the field, " Eddinger said. " What that ended up [being] was a
barrier. " They also began hearing that students of color and female
students were having trouble accessing the program. Internal
numbers showed that males were overrepresented and
women and people of color were underrepresented.
After seeing the data and talking with students, Eddinger
felt they needed to change the way they were doing things.
Over the next two years, she and her team retooled Learn
and Earn and made the program more accessible to women
and people of color. How they managed to do so is an important
story-especially now, as America's often dysfunctional
college-to-job pipeline is gaining attention from policy makers
on both sides of the aisle.
48 September/October 2022
E
ddinger didn't need much convincing to support Learn
and Earn. The program, she thought, wasn't just a way to
teach basic career literacy skills like how to craft a cover
letter, write a professional email, or divvy up tasks on a team,
though that was important. It was also a bridge connecting the
" last mile " between college and employment-the steps that are
necessary for getting a job but don't " automatically appear for
everyone, " as Eddinger put it.
Solutions to getting students, especially those who come
from disadvantaged backgrounds, through that " last mile " have
proved elusive on a system-wide scale. The issue lives in a policy
gray area, making it easy for the two main players-colleges and
employers-to slough off responsibility.
Beginning in the early 1980s, as employment-for-life began
to disappear and the workforce became more mobile, businesses
became increasingly less willing to invest in training new employees
and transferred that burden to the education system. At the
same time, the contraction of the manufacturing sector was accelerating,
wiping out jobs that required only a high school diploma.
Postsecondary education became the price of admission for
a middle-class life as jobs in the technology, health care, finance,
and service sectors became a bigger part of the economy. But colleges,
which had traditionally been focused inward on academic
achievement, were by and large slow to expand their definition
of student success beyond the grades they got in the classroom.
Middle- and upper-middle-class students figured out long
ago that the key to overcoming this dilemma was to take an internship.
Doing so allowed them to pick up job-specific skills
that were unlikely to be taught in college and to make connections
that could lead to a job offer from that firm or a similar
one. Prestigious four-year colleges institutionalized that practice
by creating portfolios of companies that would come directly
to campus to recruit and some, like Northeastern University,
Courtesy of Brendan Hughes/Bunker Hill Community College
Washington Monthly - September/October 2022
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