Episode
Scaling Internships for Every Student with Brandon Busteed
- Published
- Nov 25, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 1842
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Summary
Our guest for this episode of College & Career Readiness Radio is Brandon Busteed. Brandon says that work-integrated learning connects traditional academic study with learning that happens on the job and includes not only internships, but also co-ops, apprenticeships, job shadowing, and long-term classroom projects designed with industry input. Brandon points out that internships are a game changer: students who have an internship in college are about twice as likely to secure a good job at graduation and remain engaged in their careers, but under a third of graduates actually have such internships with real classroom applicability. He emphasizes that the biggest problems are scale and equity, noting that while 8.2 million college students want internships, only 3.6 million receive one; access skews toward students with more resources and social connections. Brandon argues that the internship supply-demand gap could be closed if every employer devoted 5% of their jobs to interns, and that even paying all interns fairly would be comparable in cost to other large-scale federal investments. According to Brandon, the quality of internships matters as much as their availability: longer internships yield better results, but any length is valuable if there’s a meaningful project, feedback, and structured reflection alongside clear learning goals. He believes that high-quality, work-integrated learning can and should be embedded into classrooms through real-world, project-based work that exposes students to a variety of industry roles. Brandon’s work at Edconic includes “industry immersive” programs, which partner with well-known organizations so students can experience hands-on projects, receive direct feedback, and learn about multiple types of jobs even if tradit…