It is a particularly bad time to be starting a career.
According to Handshake, entry level job postings fell more than 16% year over year as of August 2025. (Handshake, 2025) At the same time, applications for those jobs rose 26% year-over-year.
And to make matters worse, Deloitte reports that most so-called entry-level jobs require two to five years of experience. (Deloitte, 2025)
This formula has gotten so out of balance that colleges are trying to step in to help their graduates be “work ready” by the time they graduate. Astonishingly, Dartmouth just raised a $30 million endowment to help its undergraduates participate in internships.
The money will subsidize students who accept unpaid or underpaid internships. Dartmouth expects the endowment to support approximately 250 students annually in fields where paid internships are often difficult to find. (Dartmouth College, 2026a; The Dartmouth, 2026)
Thirty million dollars is an extraordinary amount of money to raise so college students can acquire work experience. But it begins to make sense when you look further at what has happened to the work world.
Internships Have Become Part of the Hiring Process
Internships were once useful opportunities for students to explore careers and gain exposure to professional work. They still serve those purposes, but they have become much more consequential. They are increasingly a necessary route to the first full-time job.
Students understand this; 84% of graduating seniors in the Class of 2025 reported participating in an internship, co-op or other experiential learning program. (National Association of Colleges and Employers [NACE], 2025a)
An internship is functioning as an audition for a permanent job.
The Old Bargain Is Changing
For a long time, there was an implicit division of responsibility between higher education and employers. Colleges provided students with disciplinary knowledge and conceptual frameworks. Employers hired promising graduates and gave them the opportunity to apply that knowledge in real workplace settings, developing the judgment and experience necessary to become productive professionals.
But the expectations at the entry point appear to be shifting. NACE reports that most employers now use skills-based hiring for entry-level positions. That means when employers select among candidates for full-time roles, they are looking for applicants who can demonstrate the workplace execution skills required for the job.
And the competition is no longer coming only from other new graduates. Indeed Hiring Lab reported that in May 2026, 30% of applications to entry-level jobs came from people with more than 10 years of experience. (Aidala-Brody & Puri, 2026)
The places where someone is willing to take a chance on an applicant with little experience but high potential is shrinking. Since employers have been reluctant to return to the old system, colleges seem to understand that they cannot simply hand students a degree and leave that problem to the labor market.
Colleges Are Starting to Engineer Experience for Their Students
Dartmouth is a particularly striking example, but it is far from the only one.
American University launched an internship pledge under which eligible undergraduates can receive up to $4,500 to support an unpaid or underpaid internship or research experience. The University of North Florida guarantees students access to an immersive experiential-learning opportunity, which can include an internship, research project or leadership experience. Hobart and William Smith Colleges similarly guarantee access to an internship or research opportunity and provide funding intended to make participation possible. Brown University provides gap funding for students on financial aid who secure unpaid or low-paid summer opportunities. (American University, 2026; Brown University, n.d.; Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 2026; University of North Florida, 2024, 2025)
Dartmouth describes internships as having moved from optional to critical. Its $30 million internship endowment is part of a much larger effort to redesign career development at the college. These are substantial institutional investments. They suggest that colleges are responding to a labor market in which work experience during college has become increasingly critical to getting a job when you graduate. (Dartmouth College, 2026a, 2026b; The Dartmouth, 2026)
There is something unusual about the economics of this arrangement. Employers benefit from candidates who arrive with experience, yet colleges, donors and students are increasingly paying the cost required to produce that experience.
Should Colleges Own This?
From the perspective of an individual employer, the preference for experience is understandable. Hiring someone who has already done similar work can reduce risk, shorten the time needed to become productive and lessen the amount of training a manager must provide. (Deloitte, 2025)
The problem comes when this perfectly rational decision made on the individual organizational level is repeated across the labor market. Every experienced employee was once inexperienced. If employers increasingly want workers who arrive already trained, somebody must provide the training ground.
Right now, colleges are starting to absorb some of that responsibility. They are raising money to subsidize internships, guaranteeing experiential learning and building work experience into the undergraduate years. That may help solve the short-term problem in the current market. But it also changes the traditional allocation of responsibility. The university is no longer only providing academic preparation. It is increasingly being asked to help create the workplace experience employers want to see before they will hire the graduate.
That cannot be the entire answer. An internship can provide workplace exposure, but it cannot replace several years of progressively more complex work under experienced managers. Nor can every student accumulate two or three years of relevant experience before graduating from college. At some point, employers should still hire people who have things to learn.
Colleges can help students get internships, subsidize unpaid work and guarantee experiential learning. Those are sensible responses to the labor market students are entering, and the universities doing this deserve credit for recognizing the problem. But universities cannot create an experienced workforce by themselves.
For decades, hiring people with potential and developing them was part of how organizations built their future workforce. If every employer would rather hire someone who already has experience, we eventually face a very basic problem: we run out of talent.
Dartmouth and the other universities are reaching farther across the divide to help their students gain the experience employers now demand. But colleges can only reach so far. Employers still have to reach back.
________________________________________________________________________________
Resources
Aidala-Brody, F. (2026, July 23). Entry-level jobs aren’t just for inexperienced workers. Indeed Hiring Lab. Indeed Hiring Lab: Entry-Level Jobs Aren’t Just for Inexperienced Workers
American University. (2026, August 19). Investing in Eagles: American University launches $4,500 undergraduate internship pledge. https://www.american.edu/news/investing-in-eagles-au-launches-%244-500-undergraduate-internship-pledge.cfm
Brown University. (n.d.). Exploration gap funding. https://career-center.brown.edu/connections-opportunities/exploration-gap-funding
Dartmouth College. (2026a, January 12). Dartmouth raises $30 million to offer internships for all. https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2026/01/dartmouth-raises-30-million-offer-internships-all
Dartmouth College. (2026b, April 23). A career center built for a lifetime of fulfilling work. https://due.dartmouth.edu/news/2026/04/career-center-built-lifetime-fulfilling-work
Deloitte. (2025). Closing the experience gap through talent development. Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025/closing-the-experience-gap-through-talent-development.html
Handshake. (2025, August). Workforce outlook: Class of 2026 in the AI economy. https://joinhandshake.com/themes/handshake/dist/assets/downloads/network-trends/class-of-2026-outlook.pdf
Hobart and William Smith Colleges. (2026). Pathways guaranteed internship and research funds. https://careerservices.hws.edu/resources/pathways-guaranteed-internship-and-research-funds/
National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2025a). Class of 2025 college grads responded to challenges of a tough job market. https://naceweb.org/about-us/press/class-of-2025-college-grads-responded-to-challenges-of-a-tough-job-market
National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2025b, April 7). Employer use of skills-based hiring practices grows. https://www.naceweb.org/talent-acquisition/best-practices/d78c118a-edaa-4cec-beef-7f59827d264e
National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2026a, April 3). Intern conversion rate hits highest mark in five years. https://naceweb.org/talent-acquisition/internships/intern-conversion-rate-hits-highest-mark-in-five-years
National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2026b, April 20). Employers plan to expand summer intern hiring this year. https://naceweb.org/about-us/press/2026/employers-plan-to-expand-summer-intern-hiring-this-year
National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2026c, February 24). What students need to know about the skills-based hiring process. https://naceweb.org/job-market/trends-and-predictions/what-students-need-to-know-about-the-skills-based-hiring-process
The Dartmouth. (2026, February 12). Center for Career Design raises $30 million to fund student internship opportunities. https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026/02/center-for-career-design-raises-30-million-to-fund-student-internship-opportunities
University of North Florida. (2024, December 12). UNF guarantees experiential internships, research or professional opportunities for every student starting Fall 2025. https://www.unf.edu/newsroom/2024/12/Experiential-Learning.html
University of North Florida. (2025, April 25). Navigating career success: How UNF guarantees experiential learning for students. https://www.unf.edu/newsroom/2025/04/experiential-learning-guarantee.html
