College Internships, Tenure Gaps, and Student Outcomes: A Multiple-Treatment Matching Approach

Abstract

Professional internships during college are a popular and often highly promoted activity among students. A major issue with estimating the impacts of these programs is that students often take time away from their classes to participate, and gaps in college tenure are thought or have been shown to affect many of the same outcomes as internships, often with opposing effects. Here, we make use of a multiple-treatment propensity score matching empirical approach in attempt to untangle the simultaneous effects of professional internship programs and discontinuous college tenure. Using a data set of over 442,000 students at 619 institutions of higher education in the United States, we are able to estimate the impacts of these occurrences on academic performance, relevant human and social capital gains, satisfaction with the college experience, and many post-graduation goals and plans. Overall, we find many of the direct benefits of internship participation would be underestimated if the effects of discontinuous college tenure were not accounted for. Students who are able to complete an internship program without taking a break from classes are shown to be more changed by their internship experience than those who do. Our methodology also allows for estimation of the direct effects of a gap in college tenure.