The Internship Line Is Getting Longer. High School Can’t Wait.

There’s a number in a Forbes story this week that I can’t stop thinking about. According to Handshake data cited in the piece, the median internship posting received 27 applications in 2025, up from eight in 2022. More than three times the competition in three years. And if internships are now the main way young people get their first real experience, that tells me something about high school internships and work experience: they can’t be the nice extra we get to “if there’s time” anymore.

Here’s the thing. For a long time K-12 schools have treated experience as something that happens later. College will handle it. The first job will handle it. But what if the line for that first experience is now so long that a lot of students never get to the front of it?

What’s happening with internships right now

Three pieces landed this week that, read together, tell one story.

First, Lisa Chambers’ October 14 Forbes piece on why internships matter for every major looks at Bennington College, where students have done a required Field Work Term since 1932. The article pulls together some strong data. NACE found that 43% of graduating seniors who applied for jobs this spring had at least one offer before graduation, compared with 55% of those who had completed a paid internship. Research from the Burning Glass Institute and Strada found students who completed internships in college were nearly 50% less likely to be underemployed five years out. And then there’s that Handshake number: 27 applications per internship posting in 2025, up from eight in 2022.

Second, Times Higher Education reported on October 14 on the Institute of Student Employers’ annual survey in the UK. Applications for university-level internships rose 27% in 2025-26 and applications for undergraduate placements rose 15%, while internship and placement hiring fell 8%. To be fair to the full picture, overall graduate hiring in that survey actually rose 4% this year after an 8% drop the year before, and the ISE described the early-career market as showing “some signs of recovery but remains challenging.” The survey also found 92% of employers suspected or confirmed students were using AI in assessment and selection, up from 85% the year before.

Third, Getting Smart’s October 13 recap of its New Pathways convening in Chicago profiles schools that aren’t waiting. At Oak Park and River Forest High School, students in entrepreneurship classes build business pitches through Uncharted Learning’s INCubatoredu program and use consumer research to test their ideas against competitors and customer needs. Student projects ranged from ski apparel to an AI highlight-reel tool for coaches. A culinary class runs a student restaurant and food delivery service. At Fenton High School, students can combine AP classes, work-based learning and dual enrollment with the College of DuPage.

So on one side: demand for experience is going way up and the number of formal slots isn’t keeping pace. On the other: some high schools are creating experience instead of waiting for someone to hand it out.

Experience is the new entry ticket. Why are we handing it out so late?

I want to be careful here. The data doesn’t say the entry-level job market has collapsed. The UK numbers show graduate hiring recovering. Most of the internship data is about college students, not high schoolers. And part of the jump in applications may simply be that applying has gotten easier. When you can apply to a posting in a few clicks, or let an AI tool help you churn out applications, the count goes up whether or not the number of serious candidates does. That ISE figure on AI use in applications is a hint that something like that is going on.

But even if you take all of that into account, the direction is clear. Employers are leaning harder on proof of experience, and the formal doors where students get that experience are crowded.

Here’s my question for K-12: if the first real experience is the thing that opens doors, why do we wait until students are 20 to start offering it?

I wrote about this back in 2013 in Millennials and the Job Market. My argument then was that a public digital portfolio and real work for real audiences would matter more than a paper resume. I think that’s even more true now. When a hiring manager is looking at 27 applications, or 141 for a UK graduate role, a list of courses doesn’t stand out. Work does. A business pitch tested against real customer research does. A restaurant service you helped run does.

And with AI in the picture, the bar for “real” goes up. If an AI tool can polish a cover letter, the cover letter stops telling an employer very much. What it can’t fake as easily is a track record: projects you built, people you worked with, problems you solved and can talk about. That’s the part of the work that’s still very human. In Human Still Required, I argue that judgment, relationships and trust are the work machines can’t do. Those are exactly the things students learn by doing real work alongside real people, and they’re hard to learn from a worksheet.

This is what I mean by “Preparing students for their future, not our past.” In our past, experience came after school. In their future, it may have to come during school, or a lot of students won’t get it at all.

High school internships aren’t the only door. Schools can build experience.

When I talk with school leaders about work-based learning, the conversation almost always goes straight to internships. And then it stops, because placements are hard. There aren’t enough employers. Transportation is a problem. Liability is a problem. Schedules are a problem. All true.

What I like about the Chicago examples is that they don’t start with “Where can we place a few hundred students?” They start with “What real work can students do from here?” A student business that has to compete for customers is real work. A student-run restaurant is real work. A pitch that gets tested against customer data is real work. None of those require a company to find hundreds of internship slots.

That matters for equity too. Internships have always leaned toward students who already have networks, transportation and the ability to work unpaid. The Forbes piece notes that Bennington gives need-based stipends to make its field work possible. If high schools build experience into the school day, every student gets a turn, not just the ones whose parents know someone.

I’m not saying every high school needs to become a startup incubator. I’m saying “experience” is a much bigger category than “internship,” and schools have more control over it than we tend to think.

What schools can do this week

• Audit your experience gap. Ask: how many of our seniors will graduate having done work for a real audience outside the classroom? Not “could have,” but did. Get a real number.
• Turn one existing project into a client project. Pick one course and find one local business, nonprofit or city office with a real problem students can work on. Start small.
• Count student-run work as experience. A school store, a media team, a tech help desk or a student restaurant is work. Help students document it and talk about it like work.
• Start the portfolio in ninth grade. Have students collect evidence of what they’ve built and done, with reflection on what they learned. By senior year they should be able to show, not just tell.
• Talk to employers about what they actually look for. Ask your local hiring managers what proof of experience they trust now that AI can polish an application. Then build backward from their answer.

Frequently asked questions

Are high school internships worth it if they’re hard to find?

Yes, but an internship isn’t the only way to get experience. Research cited by Forbes shows college internships are linked to more job offers and less underemployment. High schools can build similar experience through work-based learning, client projects and student-run businesses, which don’t depend on finding an outside placement for every student.

Why are internships so competitive right now?

Handshake data cited by Forbes shows the median internship posting got 27 applications in 2025, up from eight in 2022. In the UK, the Institute of Student Employers reported a 27% rise in internship applications alongside an 8% drop in internship and placement hiring. Easier online applying and AI-assisted applications may also be pushing the numbers up.

What counts as real work experience for a high school student?

Work done for a real audience with real stakes. That can be an internship or apprenticeship, but it can also be a student business, a project for a local organization, a school help desk or a student-run restaurant. What matters is that students can show what they did and explain what they learned.

The line is long. Let’s get them in it sooner.

The young people heading into this job market aren’t the problem. They’re doing what we told them to do, and then finding out the door is more crowded than anyone warned them. We can keep telling them experience will come later. Or we can start building it now, inside the schools we already run.

If your school or district is working on career-connected learning and wants to think it through together, that’s the kind of work I do with leaders every week. You can find me at JeffUtecht.com.

So I’ll ask you: what is one piece of real work your students did this year that you’d want an employer to see?

Sources

• Many Humanities Majors Shun Internships, But Not At This College, Lisa Chambers, Forbes, October 14, 2026
• Employers cut student work experience roles as demand rises, Georgia Luckhurst, Times Higher Education, October 14, 2026
• Bridging Passion and Possibility: Chicago’s Approach to New Pathways, Getting Smart Staff, Getting Smart, October 13, 2026