April 25, 2026 | Oyin Adedoyin and Ray A. Smith
For students prepping for life after college, it’s an agonizing challenge: Internships are becoming more critical to landing that first job—yet are getting harder to come by.
Even as graduate hiring shows early glimmers of a rebound, summer internship opportunities appear to be getting scarcer. Internship postings on early-career job platform Handshake were down 16% earlier this year, continuing a decline since 2023, its data show. On jobs site Indeed, postings are slightly up from 2025’s sluggish internship season but well below previous years.
Competition for those internships, meanwhile, is only getting more intense: Internships posted on Handshake during the 2024-25 academic year drew an average of 109 applicants, up from 62 the year prior and more than double the number in 2023.
Much of the intensifying scramble has to do with the ever-higher stakes of landing a solid job out of college, a feat that’s grown more difficult as employers slow hiring and AI reshapes many entry-level roles.
With unemployment for recent graduates this past year at decade highs—excluding the early pandemic—some are vying for internships while still hunting for full-time jobs. So are more college freshmen and sophomores, in the hopes of improving their own hiring chances later on, campus career counselors say.
“The reality is that for internships, students have got to get in the process very early,” said Nicole van den Heuvel, executive director of Rice University’s career-development center. “When we talk to freshmen during their orientation week, we’re in front of the students telling them, ‘You’ve got to start thinking about your career in tandem with your academic experience.’ It’s more important now.”
Chloey Cho, a 19-year-old wrapping up her freshman year at the University of California, Los Angeles, has already completed four internships alongside her studies, two in finance and two in marketing. Her goal: to maximize her chances of getting a full-time role after school.
Chloey Cho Mal Ryu
But the musicology and economics major said she has noticed an ominous trend: She learned this month that one of the internship programs that typically recruits from the on-campus investing and trading club she belongs to was no longer taking them because the firm now relied on AI to do intern-level tasks.
“So they won’t be needing interns anymore,” she said, adding that she has noticed a similar trend among other finance firms. “I was a bit demotivated.”
Some employers, like McKinsey, say they are boosting the size of their intern classes this year. Yet others have canceled or cut them back. Workplace technology company Paycom Software, which laid off more than 500 staff last fall and automated some back-office roles, recently notified interns recruited to work there this summer that it was cutting their internships, too, students and professors say. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Some students are coming up with alternatives. Nathan Goldstein, a 20-year-old electrical-engineering major at Union College, in Schenectady, N.Y., began his internship search four months sooner than last year after seeing friends struggle to find one.
Meanwhile, he helped start a campus group to help classmates to get networking and unpaid work experience on projects for nonprofits and small businesses. He expected maybe six students to show up to the first meeting. Instead, 30 attended. Even more emailed afterward to find out how they could line up some work experience, he said.
Paul Buckowski/Union College
Nathan Goldstein, right, helped launch a group at Union College that assists students in getting networking and unpaid work experience at nonprofits and small businesses.
“It’s just a really tough internship market to get into,” said Goldstein, who said he hopes to finalize his own internship plans soon.
Securing even one internship during college significantly improves the odds of landing a college-level job upon graduation, a growing body of research shows. In a ZipRecruiter survey of 3,000 soon-to-be and recent graduates released this month, those who had had internships were more likely to land a full-time job offer before graduation. They were also more likely to describe those jobs as real career steppingstones.
The share of recent college graduates who are underemployed—meaning, they are in jobs that don’t require a college degree—stood at 42.5% as of the end of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Companies, meanwhile, are hiring more of the interns they do select for full-time roles later. The average rate at which employers converted interns into full-time hires in 2025 reached a five-year high of 63%, according to a recent survey of 284 employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The survey found their intern hiring was up 3.9% this year, after falling by nearly the same rate last year.
Emil Michael
They want “to ensure upfront they have candidates who have proven themselves rather than having a large pool of candidates who haven’t tested their skills,” particularly in this economic environment, said Shawn VanDerziel, NACE’s chief executive.
Emil Michael, a 20-year-old finance and logistics management major at Ohio State University, is currently interning at a healthcare startup. But he is still on the hunt for one this summer, and has even applied for internships for the summer of 2027, too.
He has his summer job from last year, as a dock hand for a ferry, to fall back on, he said, but that’s not quite the same.
“It’s not really business related so the experience wouldn’t be as relevant,” he said.
