Student internships fail to deliver
Print Edition
MORE than 700 students of northeast China’s Shenyang Urban Construction College have finally been allowed to go home for their belated summer vacation, after nearly a week of nightmarish internships.
Mostly information engineering and mechanics majors, the students said the internship was arranged by their college and directly linked to their credit points. However, they were assigned posts that had nothing to do with their majors and provided with unsuitable accommodation.
The students were crammed into a room of no more than 150 square meters for training. More than 300 students had to share a room with just two small fans working during the night. Cafeteria staff did not serve enough food, and some of the students suffered from vomiting and diarrhea.
The frustrated interns posted their woeful experiences on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like social media.
Liaoning’s provincial education department released a statement ordering every college and university in the province to suspend all summer internships.
Following the statement, Shenyang Urban Construction College posted an apology to the students, their families and the public, admitting its internship operations were inappropriate, and promising to compensate the students.
At the same time, a vocational college in Sichuan Province was revealed to have forced over 500 students to do assembly line work some 1,500 kilometers away, telling them that the internship was obligatory for graduation.
Qian Jingfeng, a vocational guidance expert in Shanghai, said such internships were often private arrangements between companies and college teachers. He said internships involving intensive labor or basic skills were of little benefit to students’ employment after graduation and were a roundabout way to ease labor difficulties in certain companies.
Internship opportunities are scarce in China, with some students saying they can be more difficult to find than a real job.
On the one hand, the skills college students learn at school are mostly divorced from practice at work. On the other, companies are often not willing to offer pre-work training to interns, according to Qian.
Liu Jianping, a former Party chief at Tianjin University and now a national legislator, has highlighted the issue of college student internships for three consecutive years at the national “two sessions.”
Among several reasons for the problem was a lack of relevant laws and regulations.
There was also a lack of support measures and preferential policies to encourage companies to take students as interns.
“The legislature should work to introduce laws and regulations to safeguard college students’ rights. The national education spending should set up a special fund to cover insurance for interns and training expenses for companies,” Liu said.
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