Scaling Internship Programs: Why Administration, Not Employer Demand, Is the Real Bottleneck

By Emily Schaffer, Vice President of Strategic Alliances, YUPRO Placement

Paid internships are on the rise and employer demand for early career talent remains strong. Summer internship postings have rebounded significantly, increasing 22 percent in 2025 according to ZipRecruiter.  Many large employers across a wide range of industries are actively expanding their paid internship hiring, based on data compiled by The Muse. 

Yet even with this expansion in opportunity, many students still struggle to secure meaningful work based learning. But the issue is not employer reluctance; it is that administration has become the limiting factor.

A 2024 survey by the Business Higher Education Forum (BHEF) found that nearly one third of employers reported that some of their internship positions went unfilled, due largely to operational barriers such as supervision capacity, program design, and administrative overhead.  Inside Higher Ed reached the same conclusion, noting that employers frequently cite operational challenges and financial worries as major constraints, even when student interest is high. 

The opportunity and demand are present, but without scalable administrative infrastructure, even small internship cohorts are difficult to manage and large ones are nearly impossible.

The Administrative Barrier

When internship programs fail to grow, the assumption is often that there is not enough employer interest. In reality, many employers are willing, sometimes eager, to host interns, but they also are sensitive to the burden an internship can place on its HR and payroll departments.

The fear, from the employer perspective, is that adding interns will burden their existing HR systems.   Everything from headcount planning, onboarding, timecard management, documentation, and compliance can be impacted by even the smallest internship program. When presented with a streamlined model that handles these tasks for them, many employers quickly say yes.  In other words, the issue is not demand. It is the absence of systems that remove friction for everyone involved.

If employers don’t want to handle the administrative burden of implementing an internship program, who will?  Colleges and workforce programs serve as the vital source of talent for internship programs. But they are designed to teach and support students; not to perform the complex functions of an employer. Yet administering paid work based learning requires exactly that.

Already strained institutions suddenly find themselves responsible for a litany of administrative tasks such as:

• Processing payroll weekly or biweekly
  
• Ensuring wage and hour compliance
  
• Managing liability insurance and workers compensation
  
• Verifying I9 documentation and tax forms
  
• Tracking manager approvals reliably
  
• Resolving timekeeping discrepancies
  
• Supporting interns who are often navigating formal employment for the first time

These tasks and the associated costs are substantial and they become more complex as programs grow. For example, even a cohort of three to five interns can strain the administrative structures of a college. Scaling to dozens or hundreds becomes nearly impossible without additional infrastructure.

This is why many work based learning programs plateau early. The challenge is not employer participation. The challenge is the employment systems required to operate paid internships reliably and compliantly.

Why Administrative Pressure Is Increasing

Demand for applied learning continues to grow. Many colleges are securing grants that subsidize wages for interns, creating more equitable access to paid opportunities.

However, these grants also introduce more operational requirements, including reporting, employer engagement, oversight, and support for larger student cohorts. In other words, the more institutions try to expand work based learning, the heavier the administrative burden becomes.

Internship Administration Outsourcing

TA scalable internship program requires coordinated systems that many institutions do not have the capacity to build or maintain on their own. In practice, this is where centralized administrative models become essential.  YUPRO Placement’s Skills-to-Staff™ Internship Administration service provides onboarding, I9 verification, payroll processing, insurance coverage, timecard management, weekly communication with interns and managers, and access to wraparound supports that would have been impossible to replicate in house. Skills-to-Staff™ allows the college to expand paid internships significantly by removing the administrative barriers that typically limit program growth. The program also offers companies an option to implement an internship program without adding W2 employees to the payroll.

A Real World Example of Scale in Motion

One community college district provides a compelling example of what becomes possible when administrative barriers are removed leveraging a service like Skills-to-Staff. The district secured funding to support paid internships in climate related fields, including architecture, education, gardening, and community based environmental work.

The goal was to give students hands-on experience applying earth first principles across diverse sectors. But the administrative load associated with this program would have exceeded the district’s capacity. The program required:

• Onboarding dozens of interns
  
• Coordinating multiple employers
  
• Managing weekly timecards
  
• Ensuring insurance coverage
  
• Running payroll
  
• Providing ongoing student support

With YUPRO Placement managing these administrative functions, the program scaled effectively. Small businesses that could not normally afford interns participated because wages were subsidized and administration was handled externally. The college expanded access and students gained meaningful experience.

Experience Is the Bridge to Mobility

In the end, an effective and efficiently run internship program does more than save time and money; these programs can change lives. For students without professional networks or the ability to take unpaid roles, paid internships are often the only pathway into competitive early career fields. When administrative systems break down, these students lose access first.

Scaling internship programs is fundamentally about equity. When institutions have the operational support to offer paid, structured, compliant work based learning, more students can gain experience, build references, and enter the job market ready to compete.

The Path Forward

To expand work based learning nationally, we need to view internships not only as partnerships between students and employers, but as systems that require employer grade infrastructure behind the scenes.

When institutions can offload administrative complexity, including payroll, compliance, insurance, and onboarding, they can focus on what they do best: educating, mentoring, and opening doors.

Work based learning has the potential to change lives and strengthen communities. But only if we address the true bottleneck. Scaling internships begins with scaling the systems that support them.