No such thing as free credit: Intern plan hits a stalemate

Twitter
Facebook

 Email This Post
Reddit
Digg

Tell us what you think!
Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.

A proposal to give students free one-credit internships has stalled.

“There is nothing, right now, that we are ready to do with this,” University of Maine’s Associate Provost Susan Hunter said in an e-mail. She said the program is at a “very formative stage.”

The program would cost $2.7 million if every student participated, according to UMaine Vice President for Administration and Finance Janet Waldron. “It becomes lost revenue to the institution,” she said.

“They are budgeting the impact of this at the cost of every student having one credit, which I think is entirely blown out of scale,” said fourth-year journalism major Derek Mitchell, who wrote the proposal. “I think this is, for the lack of a better word, a copout.”

Waldron believes the option would drastically expand student participation, at increased cost to the university.

“Why, if you got one free credit, wouldn’t you do it?” Waldron said.

The proposed one-credit internship course would have been administered online with interns required to complete weekly journal entries to be reviewed by a graduate student or a staff member in the Career Center.

Hunter said the program could not be developed without department faculty for accreditation reasons.

Students would have had the choice to participate in the free credit, or to pay for credits under their department. Currently, each department administers its own internship courses with varying requirements. This would not have counted for some required internships such as teaching programs for education majors.

According to a study conducted by UMS, each dollar of funding for UMaine puts more than $7 back into Maine’s economy.

“Get [graduates] the experience so they get higher paying jobs, better opportunities and bring back more money to the state,” Mitchell said. “Each graduating class impacts the Maine economy by millions of dollars. Let’s make it more millions.”

Mitchell said the university should encourage students to get internships, which gives them the prior experience needed in finding jobs after graduation. “UMaine could be leading the way in making that a slightly more affordable opportunity for students.”

Hunter said she supports student internships but said students do not need to receive university credit to get internships and experience.

Mitchell said his frustration came from the lack of financial creativity from university officials. He said UMaine sent every Maine legislator a poster recently and He found this type of expenditure unnecessary and suggested funding should go to educational programs, like his internship proposal.

“That costs more than $500 for them to do. Are we on crack? Are we not talking about raising tuition by as much as 14 percent? Why are we doing stupid things when we could be investing our educational money in education?” Mitchell said. “This is exactly the type of program we could invest our money in, and instead we’re doing stupid things with it.”

“We do a lot of work with the legislature to explain our programs,” Waldron said. “It showcases our programs.”

While the university sees some value to the idea of the program, Waldron notes that the financial feasibility makes it difficult.

“It’s a very nice idea to provide internships, but there is a cost to doing that,” said Waldron.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.