Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 51

Serving Boston's non-Brahmins: Bunker Hill's paid internships are designed to give students from modest backgrounds the same connections
to employers that affluent students at elite four-year colleges enjoy.
area-also offers internships paid for by the school. Its program
includes workshops to familiarize students with the employers
they are applying to, help with résumé writing, and work on reference
requests. Though the program is just one year old, more
than 1,000 students have participated in these internships, and
administrators are setting aside $2 million of their operating
budget to expand the opportunity. Cuyahoga Community College,
in northeastern Ohio, has a summer internship program
that allows students to either work on campus or for an outside
employer, at $11 an hour. The college also covers tuition for up
to four credits and a $125 book stipend for the class. The idea,
says Sandy McKnight, associate vice president of access, learning,
and success at Cuyahoga, is to keep students engaged over
the summer so they will return to complete their degree.
That community colleges like Alamo District and Bunker
Hill can find the cash to support paid internships is something
of an anomaly. Most exist on very thin budgets. The average
two-year school spends half as much, or less, per student as the
average four-year state college, and far less than elite private universities.
Even with the help of the Boston area's corporate sector
and a family foundation behind it, Bunker Hill lacks enough
funding to offer a paid internship to everyone who wants one,
to hire the staff necessary to do the hands-on work, and to provide
the wraparound social services needed to make it possible
for more students to take advantage of the internships. Though
Learn and Earn has grown-from 20 students per year in 2012
to 116 per year today-for a campus of 16,000 the program
remains tiny.
It's clear that paid internship programs like Learn and Earn
are unlikely to grow to scale and spread to more campuses without
greater outside funding. (See Jamaal Abdul-Alim, " A Job
and a College Degree Before You Graduate, " page 30.) In February
2020, the Department of Education took a modest step
when it gave 190 schools waivers allowing them to pay for work
study jobs with private-sector employers as an experiment. This
meant that colleges like Alamo, which participated in the pilot,
could let their students work at an outside job aligned with their
field of study rather than for the university checking IDs at the
gym. Though the program has continued under President Joe
Biden's administration, it is slated to end after the 2022-23 academic
year. Last year's Build Back Better reconciliation bill included
tens of billions of new dollars for community colleges, including
for wraparound services like child care. The bill collapsed
last winter because every GOP senator and a couple of Democrats,
most prominently West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin,
refused to vote for it, and though a slimmed-down version
passed the Senate and was awaiting a House vote when this issue
went to press in mid-August, it contained little money for
higher education. Yet, given growing Republican support, at
least rhetorically, for vocational programs, there could be bipartisan
movement for more funding for community colleges after
the midterm elections.
While it waits for help from policy makers, Bunker Hill will
continue to expand Learn and Earn and bring more students
and potential employers together through paid internships. It's
the right thing to do, Eddinger said, because it's a tool for retention
and college completion and gives an economic lift to her
students. She just wishes lawmakers would see it that way. " It's
a failure of public vision, and it's a failure of public policy. There's
no other way to say it. "
Laura Colarusso is the senior editor of Nieman Reports, an online and
quarterly magazine devoted to raising the standards of journalism. She
was previously the digital managing editor of WGBH News in Boston.
Washington Monthly 51
Courtesy of Brendan Hughes/Bunker Hill Community College
Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

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