Funding Unpaid and Underpaid Internships Through Cross-Campus Collaboration

Matt Cowley:

At one point, somebody actually asked me, “How do you keep getting all these people to come to these meetings that you keep scheduling?” And I’ll be honest, I was a bit naive and I didn’t know that I had done anything magical or different. I was just telling people, “Hey, I think we’re all in agreement that this is an issue and we want to solve this problem and I would love if you all came and chatted with me about how we get this done.” And people showed up. And so what I would say is, if you are doubtful that people will show up, every institution’s different, but I would just say try because there very often people actually want to do things like this. They want to solve really wicked problems, as they say.

So my job was really just articulating how this problem was affecting our students and how they could play a part in solving it.

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere Podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker. And today I am joined by Dr. Matt Cowley, the associate vice provost for Career and Professional Development at Virginia Tech. Thank you for being here, Matt.

Matt Cowley:

Thank you so much for having me. I enjoy this podcast and so I’m really excited for our conversation.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, me too. I’m so glad to have you. And I am excited to talk to you today about some really cool work that you and your team are doing there at Virginia Tech to fund unpaid and underpaid internships for your students. So you all have gotten very creative with addressing this challenge and you’ve also really leaned into collaboration and partnerships with other departments on campus and employers to make it all work. So I’m excited to learn more about the solution you’ve come up with and also how you have built and really fostered those partnerships. And I apologize for anyone listening if you hear some frogginess in my voice, I was just telling Matt before this that my one-year-old son was generous enough to share his cold with me, so apologies, I might sound a little funky today.

But anyway, before I get into my questions, Matt, is there anything else you would like to add about yourself, your background or your role there at Virginia Tech?

Matt Cowley:

The only things that I would share, number one is that I work with an amazing team here at Virginia Tech. So I have around 34 full-time staff and a few folks who work with us part-time in different capacities. And then we have another 30-some odd students who work with us either as peer career advisors or interns or frontline staff. And our work would be impossible without them. So I want to make sure to highlight them upfront. A lot of the stuff we’re going to talk about today is really flowing out of one of the teams at our office called Professional Development and Experiential Initiatives. And so want to make sure that I highlight that team as well, which is led by our wonderful director, Becca Scott.

So again, I’ll share more about exactly what I mean when I say all of that, but just upfront wanted to make sure that I highlighted the amazing work happening on that particular team in our office as well.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. And always, all the good stuff usually happens with a wonderful team.

Matt Cowley:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

So I love it. Okay, well, before I get into the specific questions about our topic today, I do want to kick us off with a question that I ask all of our guests here on the pod and that’s, what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Matt Cowley:

So I was thinking about this, Meredith, and I have two answers, but they’re related. So the first is really that, for me, Career Everywhere highlights the role of the entire university ecosystem and the career preparedness of our students. But then more and more, I’m also starting to think of it in a broader way, so really thinking about the student’s Neso system, so the things beyond the university that really impact their career readiness. So specifically thinking about the interactions between their microsystems, their families, their other part-time work environments, their friends and those sorts of things and all of that contributes to a student’s career readiness and I don’t know that we always leverage that as well as we could. So those are my two answers.

The university obviously is key, but there’s a lot going on in a student’s life beyond the institution as well.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s a great point. I think we do hear a lot and talk a lot about the ecosystem within the university, but like you said, there are many other influences at play, so that’s a great point. Okay, well, now I would love to dig into our topic today, which is again, how you all have found a way to fund unpaid and underpaid internships and how you’ve used cross-campus collaboration to do it. I would love to start with some context and a lay of the land. So can you talk a bit about the challenges you were facing with unpaid and underpaid internships and making those financially feasible for your students?

Matt Cowley:

I will do what I learned to do in my PhD program, which is address this in a funnel. So I’m going to start with a very, very broad-

Meredith Metsker:

As a marketer, I love that, so we love a funnel.

Matt Cowley:

A little bit of context and then get to the very specific thing that you asked me. So at a really high level, I will say that Virginia Tech is committed to ensuring that every student at the institution has the access necessary to the very best of what we consider to be a Virginia Tech education. And so this is really coalesced into something called the Virginia Tech Advantage. And while there are advancement and fundraising components to the Virginia Tech Advantage that we could get into if we really wanted to, I think the crux of the initiative is really trying to identify and remove barriers that we know really impede students from experiencing what’s pivotal to not only student success, but post-graduation success.

So with respect to my area specifically, we focus on work-based learning and the barriers to work-based learning, experiential learning. We know that there’s like eight different terms we can use to talk about that stuff and we love our buzzwords, but we really have identified four key barriers and trying to address those in a lot of different ways from various angles. So the first is capacity. So are there enough opportunities, right? So we know, for example, the Business and Higher Education Forum put out some data that said, “Hey, there’s a big gap between the number of students who want to do internships and the number of students who actually did do an internship,” which leans toward this idea that there might not be enough opportunity out there.

And then that even gets more challenging in particular geographic locations, and we can get to more about that in a second. The second would be communication. So do students actually know that these opportunities exist? Do they know that they’re important? I know that, in career services, we try to do the best we can to share that information with students and to make them aware of that, but we’ve got to do a good job at communication. The third is curriculum. So is there enough space in the academic curriculum, the things that the student has to do in order to reach graduation? Is there space in the curriculum for work-based learning so that the student is not having to do something extra on top of their academics?

And then finally cost. So how can we identify and address the real and opportunity cost to participating in internships and other forms of work-based learning? So I’m thankful that we have partners in the Academy for Experiential Learning. So that’s one of the partners that we work with very closely. They lead something called the Bridge Experience Program and Bridge is a part of our re-accreditation quality enhancement plan or QEP, some folks may be familiar with. And so the goal is really to embed a career-related experience, what we call a bridge experience into the curriculum across the institution for every program. And so they work with academic departments in a really bespoke way to make sure that that’s happening and we’re well on our way to that.

And we partner with them really from that capacity perspective to understand, “What are the types of opportunities this department believes are relevant to their students and how can we make sure that there’s enough opportunities available or that we’re at least helping them see the opportunities that are available to their students?” But from a cost perspective, we also know that getting experience can be expensive. And so if a student is, for example, registering for a credit-bearing course, then that means they are actually having to pay for their own experience. I won’t tip my hat too much into my opinions on that, but I will just say that that can be a challenge.

Additionally, there are other real costs like renting housing, transportation, food. Depending on your institution and the type of student you have, you could also be talking about childcare. And these things can be prohibitive to students in terms of their ability to participate in internships and other forms of work-based learning. For Virginia Tech, we’re located in Southwest Virginia, which means that, while there’s absolutely opportunities here locally, a lot of our students are going to end up needing to leave either the Southwest Virginia area or Virginia entirely in order to find opportunities, which means that they will have to do things like maintain a pricey commute if they’re going somewhere that is in a commutable distance, but perhaps they’re having to drive an hour or more.

And then other students actually have to maintain two rents because they have a lease here in Blacksburg and then they’re having to do a sublease or something in their location for an internship and that can obviously get expensive as well. So unpaid and underpaid internships are not just a challenge. I think sometimes we cognitively kind of know that it’s a big deal, but a lot of time we frame it as almost like, “Oh yeah, that’s a nuisance.” It’s like, no, it’s actually prohibitive. It’s a deal breaker for many of our students.

Meredith Metsker:

Those are significant barriers for sure, regardless of your age. Initially I was thinking if you’re a really young student, more traditional college age, you just might not have that much money at your disposal, but even if you’re an adult learner, like you mentioned, you might have childcare or you have to figure out caring for an elderly parent or something like that. It’s a lot to balance with education and life as we all know.

Matt Cowley:

And when I joined Virginia Tech, I learned of a story of a student who actually, and I won’t name the actual state, but they were in another state living in their car with a dog trying to just get experience and have an internship. We ended up finding out about this because of a family member of theirs who ended up contacting the institution and seeing if there was anything that we could do. I share that because I think sometimes, again, this becomes this either esoteric or ephemeral problem that’s not real. You don’t really feel it. And sometimes it’s helpful to just know there is a person with a name and a background and a family that loves them that’s really just trying to make the best of their college education and wanting to make their family proud.

And sometimes they make decisions that they feel like they have to make in order to get experience, so that they can get that ROI on the higher education that they’ve paid for that we all talk about. And a lot of times, the money is a huge barrier to getting the experience they need to make that happen.

Meredith Metsker:

I think that’s a good segue to my next question. So speaking of the money, you all have come up with some really creative workarounds to financially support your students in unpaid and underpaid internships. Can you, I guess, maybe share some of the things that you’re doing and the context of why you have to do those things and then also who you’ve worked with to make it all happen.

Matt Cowley:

I’ll start by thanking some colleagues in what here in Virginia is called the Virginia Talent Opportunity Partnership, which is an agency, I guess I’ll call it, under the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia or SCHEV as we call it and they’re the governing body for institutions within the Commonwealth. They’ve committed to making a few different grants available on a regular basis to institutions to really empower and drive work-based learning. And so we’ve chosen to use the money that they’ve made available in this way by putting it into the hands of students to the extent possible.

And so obviously, there’s other administrative things that we may end up needing to do with the money as well, but a vast majority of what we’ve received in grant funding over the past two years has gone to doing that. So some of the things we’ve done, for example, is partner with financial aid to grow the number of students who are actually leveraging federal work-study. And we’re also working with our campus partners to try and change and shift some of those federal work-study hourly opportunities or wage positions and turn them into internship opportunities on campus.

We have also leveraged a grant to do wage matching for on-campus internships. So we have an on-campus internship program called Campus Intern EXP. And by doing wage matching, we’ve actually been able to drastically increase the number of paid on-campus internships that are available to our students, which just increases that capacity and also access, right? So instead of that student having to leave the state to get an internship opportunity, they’re able to stay right here in Blacksburg where they already have a lease and potentially even do an internship during the normal academic year versus the summer. We’ve also stood up internship support funding for students who are in unpaid and underpaid internships off campus. So this is probably where the majority of the really …

Everything is hard, don’t get me wrong, nothing’s easy, but this is probably where the majority of our heart and soul has been for the past couple of years, trying to stand up a process to get internship support funding into the hands of students. And I’m using that language specifically because this is not a scholarship. That is very litigious and it gets really complex, but the short version of it is internship support funding. The way that we did this was to work with quite a few entities, the comptroller’s office, university scholarships and financial aid, general counsel, payroll, advancement and some others to really just say, “What is a process that we can use to put money in the hands of students that doesn’t run afoul of any federal laws or any other sorts of rules and processes that the institution has as well?”

And we were able to bring all of these folks to the table. And I know I’m making that sound really simple, so we can talk more about it if we need to, but we were able to bring these folks to the table and really just say, “This is the issue. How do we solve it?” and not being married to any particular approach, but really just trying to see what are the creative solutions we could come up with. And the short version of the story is that, in the last five minutes of a meeting, I had been meeting with many of the folks I just named and we had not come up with anything that would work. We had surfaced all the reasons why everything that we had thought of wouldn’t work and all of the things that we couldn’t do.

And in the last five minutes of this meeting right before lunch, I said, “Man, what if we just gave this money to an employer and let the employer give it to the student?” Somebody in the room was like, “I think you could do that.” And so we were able to write up a proposal and get it signed off on by all the people that needed to sign off on that. And so our process that we currently are using is to basically assess a student’s need and what their expenditures will be. And if they are negative, meaning that their expenses are more than what they’re bringing in, then we consider them to be eligible for funding and then we go through a few other things that I won’t bore you with. And then we give that money with an MOU to the employer who then makes that money available to the student.

And so I’ve only ever heard of maybe one other institution who does something similar to this. I’m not saying that it’s novel and that nobody’s doing it, but it’s very different than anything that I had done before. I had used some other payroll processes at our previous institution to do something similar, but every institution’s unique. So if I could say one last thing and then I’ll hush and see what other questions you have, but if I could say one thing about this particular process, it is bespoke. It is something that we built because it is what would work at Virginia Tech.

And so I think that, a lot of times, we try to benchmark and use things from other institutions and while I would be more than happy and already have shared some things about this process with other institutions, there’s probably going to be institutions where this would never work and they have to build something else. And so I hope that if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “We tried that. That doesn’t work,” at the very least, takeaway that bringing people around the table and just talking about what won’t work and where you’re trying to go can still end up leading to some really great places.

Meredith Metsker:

For sure. And I know we will talk about how you got all those people to the table in the first place here in just a minute. So I’m curious, okay, so this process, you work with, what, payroll or financial aid and then they give the money directly to the employer.

Matt Cowley:

So we give them money directly to the employer.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, you give them, okay. So you just cut them a check kind of thing?

Matt Cowley:

So it goes through procurement, which is probably another partner that I forgot to name because they were a part of this as well. It goes through a procurement process. And so the employer has to be set up as a vendor. They have to pass all sorts of checks and balances. We just recently, and I’ll talk about some lessons learned later, but we just recently got clearance to use a direct pay process to make that a little bit easier and faster for us and for the student as well, which was really important. But we actually have the money in a fund from the grant and we’re able to do a payment to the employer who then makes that money available to the student.

And so what that does is the reason financial aid needed to be involved is because they’re dealing with federal laws related to student support. And so we wanted to make sure that whatever we did was in alignment with those processes and laws. And this money, because the money is coming from the employer, the student is taxed on it and it’s still considered when they are filing their FAFSA. And so it was important to have them at the table because there’s a lot that we just don’t know and a lot that, in my world, at least traditionally, career services hasn’t dealt with. And so we are the ones doing it, but it’s not something that I would suggest going out and trying to do on your own without the procurement folks and the financial aid folks to help speak into that process.

Meredith Metsker:

It makes sense that advancement would also potentially be involved too because they have these partnerships and relationships with employers as well. And just to confirm, so the reason you can’t just give money directly to students is because of financial aid reasoning, right?

Matt Cowley:

Yeah. So the long and short of it, I am not … Let me … First, the disclaimer is that I’m not a financial aid expert, but the disclaimer aside, the biggest reason that the way it was explained to me, and this is a perhaps good metaphor, perhaps very crude, but if I were to take the keys to a Range Rover, go outside and stand in the middle of the street and say, “I’m going to throw this up in the air and whoever gets this, the key to the Range Rover can have the Range Rover,” if I do that and a student happens to get those keys, it’s not really a problem.

As soon as I go outside with those keys and throw them up in the air and say, “Whoever gets these keys, as long as it’s a student from Virginia Tech, they can keep the keys.” Now that’s a financial resource that has to be considered as a part of the financial aid process. And so we have something here at Virginia Tech, and other institutions may have something similar, but we have something called, I think it’s Policy 3900, which really specifies who and how money can be given to students, who can do it and how it has to be done. And essentially, the short version of that policy is that it has to be done through university scholarships and financial aid.

And so any other processes really needed to be fine tuned and tweaked to ensure that it was in alignment with the law and with the policies that were in place.

Meredith Metsker:

Man, that is a lot of moving parts.

Matt Cowley:

It is. And honestly, it’s one of those things that we are thankful for having really good partners who are creative and also who are just willing to have the conversation because there were quite a few times where we felt like we were just going in a circle, and every time we said we wanted to do something like this, got to give students money for unpaid and underpaid internships, people would say, “You got to go talk to financial aid.” And it was almost like, “Okay, well, we know that that’s not going to work,” because of the Range Rover metaphor I just gave.

But I have a really amazing colleague over in university scholarships and financial aid who sat down with us and really walked us through, “If you’re going to do this, here’s how it would need to work,” and that was really a blessing for us in the end.

Meredith Metsker:

I want to ask you how you got all of these folks involved. So obviously a big part of the story is how many groups and stakeholders are involved in making it happen. So you have you all in the career center, you got financial aid and scholarships, comptroller’s office, advancement, procurement, legal, employers, I’m probably missing some others. So as AVP, how did you go about getting everyone to the table and rowing in the same direction?

Matt Cowley:

I’ll say a couple things. One is that, at one point, somebody actually asked me, “How do you keep getting all these people to come to these meetings that you keep scheduling?” And I’ll be honest, I was a bit naive and I didn’t know that I had done anything magical or different. I was just telling people, “Hey, I think we’re all in agreement that this is an issue and we want to solve this problem. And I would love if you all came and chatted with me about how we get this done.” And people showed up. And so what I would say is, if you are doubtful that people will show up, every institution’s different, but I would just say try because there very often people actually want to do things like this. They want to solve really wicked problems, as they say.

The other thing I will say about Virginia Tech is our motto is, “Ut prosim,” which is Latin for that, “I may serve.” I know it sounds a little bit flowery and also hokey, pun intended, because Hokie is our mascot, but the campus partners at Virginia Tech really do want to serve students. And so my job was really just articulating how this problem was affecting our students and how they could play a part in solving it. And I genuinely needed them. And so I won’t say it was all me because it definitely was not all me. There were moments where I had to go to folks above me and get them on board with helping me rally some folks.

And so I report up to Undergraduate Academic Affairs and so leveraging my relationship with the vice provost to be able to bring some of the other campus partners into the room. And then other times, it was literally just an email to say, “Are you willing to come and have this conversation with me?” and folks saying yes or sending a delegate. And so I’m thankful for that, because honestly, when I saw this question, I was like, “Well, did I do anything outside of just ask people to show up and perhaps articulate the issue well maybe?”

Meredith Metsker:

Well, that’s what first came to my mind is I think with this issue, I think it naturally is tangible. I think everyone can understand students want internships, they need them in many cases, but they just don’t have the funding to do that.

Matt Cowley:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

But I’m guessing that you also really connected that for them really well. So I would love to hear more about how you described the challenge or just how you broached the subject with all these folks.

Matt Cowley:

Really, some of it was trying to do some digging to understand what the actual issue was and getting some data. Some of the data was quantitative, understanding about how many students at any given time might be doing an internship, how many internships are posted in our platform that looked like they were unpaid, understanding what the cost of living was in various areas where our students are doing internships. And so looking at, “Hey, if this is the pay,” because we have a little bit of data to understand around what our students are making in some of their internships, “So if this is the pay, but they’re in this geographic location, they’re actually underpaid. And if they’re not being paid at all, here’s how much debt they might be going into.”

But then it was also servicing the qualitative, the stories of the students who we knew have had challenges. And so the tandem between us too, I would say it’s easy in an email to share data or in a meeting to quickly run off some statistics, but honestly, the thing that people remember and the thing that people bring up to me are the stories. And as a matter of fact, the story I told you about the student living in their car, I was meeting with one of our communications folks in preparation for this to make sure that I wouldn’t get myself in trouble by describing something the wrong way and he actually recounted the story to me to help.

He was like, “Oh, there’s this story about this student,” and I was like, “Oh, yeah, I’m the one who started to circulate that story across the institution.” And so it’s a really good moment to realize not only is it this quantitative bit … I’m a qualitative researcher by trade. So whenever a story sticks with somebody, I’m like, “This is good because that means it tapped into an emotion, but also it made people want to come and sit down and get to work, which is obviously the most important part.”

Meredith Metsker:

Absolutely. And I’m sure it felt for a lot of these folks like a problem. It’s a big problem, but one that they realistically have a chance at solving, especially when everyone works together, which I’m sure feels great for everyone involved.

Matt Cowley:

Yeah. And one of the surprising things was the number of times that I, in an email, said specifically what I thought someone could do to contribute to this initiative. And they showed up solely to tell me that that is not how things work and they could not do that. And I was so thankful for it because it meant that they were in a room. They didn’t just respond via email saying, “No, that’s not how anything works, kid. You got to go and kick rocks.” It was really like, “No, I’ll come to this meeting on a Tuesday at 9:00 in the morning and know that’s not going to work, but let’s try to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish and build something together.”

Meredith Metsker:

I’m curious, how long did this process take from you first starting to gather this group of people to successfully getting this money to employers?

Matt Cowley:

Probably eight months, eight, nine months of work. Really, when I got here, we had found out that we had a $1 million endowment that is actually now $1.5 million endowment to support students who are interning in various levels of the government, so local, state, federal. And then we started to apply for grants and these grants were $100,000. And so we had a couple of grants. And so at a certain point, to be a bit crude, you’re sitting on money. And I was able to go to people and say, “I have all this money, a lot, that I can’t actually do what I’m supposed to do with it because there’s no process.”

And so there’s a little bit of pressure that that creates, right? I know that a good chunk of this is goodwill and people really showing up because they want to have the conversation. There was nobody that was that … It wasn’t like anybody else was accountable for how this money got spent, so I can’t say that it was all pressure related to that money, but I think people realizing that there were real dollars and cents on the line that actually could be in the hands of students that we were sitting on because we didn’t have a process to get it into the hands of students, made the problem also feel more tangible.

We’ve worked with the advancement folks that you mentioned. There’s another endowment now that we’re partnering with the Division of Student Affairs to steward and it can support unpaid or underpaid internships and on-campus food pantry. And so that also makes it real. I think a lot of times you’re starting with no money and you’re saying, “Well, when we get some money, we want to make sure there’s a process in place.” And so I’m not suggesting anybody do it the way that we did it because it was a little bit stressful, to be quite honest, but I think the eight, nine months of really trying to figure this out was maybe fast in some ways because people knew that there was real money on the line that we had to get out the door.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, and speaking of the money, so also to clarify, so the money for helping students with these underpaid and unpaid internships, that came from grants and the endowment or one or the other?

Matt Cowley:

Yeah. So we have a couple of grants from VTOP and SCHEV. So VTOP, the Virginia Talent Opportunity Partnership/SCHEV, we have an endowment through the Public Service Education Institute here at Virginia Tech and so that’s a $1.5 million endowment. And there’s a mirror endowment actually in the College of Ag and Life Sciences. And so we’re currently working, that’s going to require a bit of a different process. We definitely do not have time to get into all the complications with that, but there’s money there to support the students who are interning in government.

We also have a corporate grant that allows us to do some wage matching for on-campus internships. And then we also have a fund that our team manages that people can donate directly to. And so we’re currently working on standing up more supporters for that fund as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Good to know. I just always like to ask that because I know listeners will want to know, “Where’s this money coming from?” So going back to all the groups that were involved here, it sounds like everyone was pretty collaborative and willing to work with you. I’m curious how it went with employers, what their responses were to this idea. I’m sure your team probably at first tried to convince the employers, “Hey, maybe you should pay your interns.” But I guess I’m curious how employers responded to the idea of you giving them money to pay students because they won’t.

Matt Cowley:

I will be kind to our employers and say, the employers that I talk to, they want to pay their interns. And so when they don’t, it’s typically because they can’t, not because they won’t, right?

Meredith Metsker:

Got you, yeah.

Matt Cowley:

So with that being the case, the narrative and the rhetoric that I use is, “We just want to come alongside you. This is about the student. This is not about any hand slapping or finger wagging at an employer.” I think that, from an ethical perspective, I think anybody who’s working, period, should get paid, but that’s again a tangent that we don’t have time for. So I think that, when we were talking to employers, the biggest thing was the how, right? So we realized that Very quickly that even though we had our process stood up, we understood what was going to happen from a procurement perspective. We actually didn’t know what was going to happen on the employer end, that that was a bit of a black box.

And the employer was actually going to have to do some work to figure that out and most of the employers, I will say, were completely happy to do that, up to and including entities that we thought we would have the biggest trouble with, like school systems where we had some teachers doing their work in schools or some aspiring teachers doing their work in schools and we thought, “This is going to be difficult.” And it took a bit, but they wanted to figure out how to make this work. They wanted these student teachers to be able to receive money for the work that they were doing.

So I will say for the most part, it was really easy to convince them, maybe the execution was a little bit more difficult than we originally thought it was going to be, so we had to be patient and try to learn from some of the early mistakes. And also just realizing that the first time we did it, while I would love to say the first time was perfect or that the first time was a little off and the second time was perfect, we’re still growing and we’re still innovating and learning how to do this better and better. And I’m hopeful that it will be smooth the next time we do it because we’re about to get ready to give away some more funding in the spring semester for the summer. But I think that we’ll continue to iterate and make sure that this is as smooth as it can be.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m glad you mentioned the work that happens on the employers then, because yeah, I suppose you need to have receipts, for lack of a better word, on that the money is actually making it to the student’s pockets.

Matt Cowley:

Absolutely. And we have a process that involves an MOU that the employer has to sign to say, “Yes, I’m going to get this money to the student.” They can do that in the form of a one-time payment or stipend or they can supplement wages that are already given to the student. We are not in that process. We just want to make sure that that money gets into the hands of the student to support what the student needs. But most of the employers really just wanted to understand how exactly is this going to work. And there are some types of employers for whom this is more challenging, right?

And so nonprofits and government folks have a harder time. It’s not impossible. Sometimes it’s just more challenging. And then there are other times where it’s like that’s a no-go for one reason or another. And unfortunately, that’s one of the downsides of that process.

Meredith Metsker:

It’s just all part of the learning process, as you just mentioned.

Matt Cowley:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

And on that note, I would just love to hear more about how this has all worked so far. So if there are any early results or learnings you would like to share, I would love to hear them.

Matt Cowley:

For the on-campus internship program, I know we’ve talked a lot about internship support funding, but for the on-campus internship program, we saw 167% growth in student participation in our on-campus internship program. So it was very clear that there are real opportunities on campus that can absolutely generate a lot of value for our students in their career preparedness, but our campus partners need money, right? And I think many of them took seriously the fact that if they could afford one intern, we could come alongside them and wage match them at 50%. Many of them realized, “Hey, I can hire two,” and they did. And so we’re thankful to them for that.

For the internship support funds in the spring and summer of 2025, we had 104 eligible applicants for funding and they requested $452,000 in internship support funds, which I think, if I did the math correctly, which somebody can check me and can email me if I didn’t, but it’s like $4,300 or so per student. And so that’s actually not a lot. I know it might sound like a lot, but that’s actually not a lot in comparison to the expenses that our students have. And so we were able to support 66 students out of that 104. And so while that is great and I don’t want to diminish the support that we have for those students, what comes to the front of mind for me is that we could not support every student who was eligible.

And also for the students we did support, it was often us having to make a decision to give them less than what they requested so that we could support more students, right? And so what that shows me is that we just need more money, that we have a start, but we need more funds. We also learned a lot, I talked about this a little bit, but we learned a lot about the inefficiencies that we had in our process. And so during the first couple of runs, I saw firsthand how just random administrative hiccups or things that weren’t clear or us not being as communicative and asking enough questions actually disadvantaged the students that we were trying to support.

And so we’re trying to learn from some of our missteps and link arms with our campus partners, so that we can ensure that we have systems that work seamlessly in the future. So like I said, we were going through a procurement process that, for lack of a better term, was just unnecessary. It was just a lot of paperwork going back and forth. And so one of my folks in my office said, “Hey, we have something at this institution called Direct Pay and this seems like it would be eligible for that process. It would be a lot faster.” And I just went and asked in an email, “Hey, can we use Direct Pay instead of doing what we’ve been doing? Seems like it would be faster,” and the response was, “Yeah, you can do that, right?”

And so it’s just knowing how to ask the question or being willing to ask the question, but also learning from what doesn’t work. And then realizing obviously the conversation we just had, which is that the process we’ve built is heavily dependent on the employer’s willingness to receive the funds and dispense it to the student. And so this is easier for some employers than others. And so we’ve got to continue to do a couple of different things. One is stand up alternative processes if possible. That is a hill that I’m not ready to climb mentally, but at some point, we’ll probably need to design some alternative processes. And then the other thing is employer education because there have been several times where an employer said no. And when we actually said, “Why can you help us understand what’s going on?” and we had a conversation with them, they were like, “Oh, well, we can do that, right?”

And so it was really the same challenges that some of our international students have with employers where the employer says, “Well, we don’t sponsor. We don’t want to have anything to do with sponsoring international students.” And then if they actually hear what the process is and how simple it might be to employ an international student, all of that fear and anxiety around it goes away and they’re able to do it. And so sometimes it’s policy, but sometimes it’s understanding and education.

Meredith Metsker:

You mentioned the future a little bit. So I would love to hear more about what your future goals and vision are for this initiative.

Matt Cowley:

I hate to say it again, but more money is the future.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Well, I figured we would touch on that one.

Matt Cowley:

Yeah. So more money is huge. I think we’ve got to figure out a couple different things. So for me, I know that while I love our partners in SCHEV and VTOP, I know that at some point we may not have these grants, right? Priorities shift, budgets change. And so I’ve been trying to look at, “Are there ways to fund our on-campus internship wage matching program through corporate gifts?” And so for example, the corporate grant that I shared earlier came from a company who wanted to diversify engineering and the engineering employment pipeline. And so we’ve been able to use that money to say, “Well, if you have an engineering internship on campus and you are willing to hire a student with a federal work-study award, federal work-study will pay 75% of that student’s wages and we will use the rest of this money to pay the other 25% of that student’s wages. And so you get an intern at no cost.”

I would love to do more things like that with other companies. And so if somehow a company is listening to this and you want to give us some money to pilot this, I would love to do it. But what I’m hoping is that companies will actually see that, no, the student’s not working for you, but you could be building a pipeline for your company with dollars and cents and no personnel, right? You don’t actually have to supervise the intern, develop the intern, do any of that stuff. You are just putting your name on an internship program that is developing talent that then has an affinity for your organization. So maybe a hair brand idea, but something that we’re trying to do.

We also know that a lot of folks who are more advantaged, families who have a bit of money or alumni who just have a big heart are willing to give to initiatives like this and so we want to make this easy to give to. So we have a link on our website where folks can go scan a QR code or click a link and just give directly to a fund that supports internship support funds as well as our clothing closet. And so that is something that we want to continue to do and our partners in advancement are committed to continuing to raise dollars for this. And that’s connected to the Virginia Tech Advantage initiative that I shared earlier.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. It reminds me of what we were talking about earlier about solving tangible problems. I feel like donors really appreciate a tangible thing they can donate to. So it’s not just giving to the career center, it’s giving to internships or career closet or the food pantry or whatever it is.

Matt Cowley:

And I think beyond that, honestly, the future on the student side is making sure that students know that these resources are available and being able to offer them at such a regular cadence that students can count on them as they’re planning for their experience. The Bridge Experience that I mentioned earlier, the Bridge Experience program is really meant to come alongside students and help them plan out when and how and where they’re going to do their career related experience. And so while we know many of our students are doing more than one internship at this point, I would love for students to be able to pinpoint when exactly they want to do their internship, but also know how they’re going to access the resources necessary to accomplish that.

And so we’re in the very early stages of being able to provide this type of support, but I think, in the future, this will be sort of institutionalized in a way that students will know, “Here’s when the application opens. Here’s when it closes. Here’s when I need to start searching for my opportunity,” and being able to leverage all of those things in a very cohesive way.

Meredith Metsker:

And as it becomes more institutionalized, I imagine that enrollment and admissions is going to love talking about it when they’re talking with prospective students.

Matt Cowley:

And I also think we’ve got to continue to do a good job of scaffolding learning, right? And so while I think providing the resources is helpful, we also have a 70 plus year old program in our office called the Cooperative Education and Internship Program, which used to be its own office and is now a program within our office. It is a zero-credit, zero-fee course that students can register for and it really helps to scaffold their learning and help them make meaning of their experience. And so while we have been reluctant and hesitant to attach the internship support funding to the course because we don’t want to create unnecessary barriers, we also want to make sure that students understand the benefits of being in a structured environment while they’re doing their internship or other formal work-based learning.

I’ll never forget, and I’ll say this in hush, but I’ll never forget a student at a round table that I was at Unprompted, I don’t think I had ever met him, he didn’t know who I was, but they were asking him about his internship experience the previous summer and he immediately started talking about how beneficial it was for him to be in a class, how he was working and the work was good and the money was good because he was being paid. But to be able to connect his learning to what he had been learning in the classroom over the past two and a half years, he actually needed that internship course. It just so happened to be that it was the one that our office facilitated.

So it made me really proud in that moment, but how do we connect those learning opportunities to these funding opportunities without creating barriers? I don’t have the answers to that question, but I think it’s something that we will have to address in the near future as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I hear that in interviews on this podcast a lot that career centers are really focusing on helping students connect the dots between what they learn in experiential learning or in classes and connecting that to what employers are looking for.

Matt Cowley:

Absolutely. There’s a big articulation gap, which is another buzzword. I’m going to use all the buzzwords you’ve heard of before.

Meredith Metsker:

Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Matt Cowley:

There is a big articulation gap where students are having experiences and perhaps even reflecting on them in some way, but then very often are not able to articulate to an employer what the value of that experience is, how it has contributed to their career preparedness and their proficiency in various competencies like communication, teamwork, problem solving and all of the things that we know from our various bodies like the National Association of Colleges and Employers and others. And so we are trying to come at that through this course while they are actually going through their experience.

Because divorce from the experience, it could be helpful and likely is helpful, but in real time, while you’re going through and having to submit a reflection on what you experienced in the previous few weeks is really powerful for our students.

Meredith Metsker:

So do you offer that course every semester?

Matt Cowley:

It is offered every semester, yes. And one of the things that, not to brag on myself at all, this is, again, Campus Park.

Meredith Metsker:

No, you go for it. Go for it.

Matt Cowley:

One of the things I was really excited to do when I got here, my predecessor, Donna Ratcliffe, who is a giant in the field of career services and was retiring, she had been fighting for years to get the fee removed from that course. And so in my very first budget meeting here at Virginia Tech, I was able to bring that up as something that we absolutely needed to solve. And I was thankful that the folks around the table, we took some conversation, but the folks around the table were committed to figuring out how we remove that $75 fee, so that students could actually just access good quality learning without having to pay, right? “You are getting experience that you shouldn’t be paid for. I don’t want you to have to pay me $75 for the learning that’s happening.”

Meredith Metsker:

I’m hearing a theme throughout a lot of your answers where it just starts with, “Just ask. Just make the ask.”

Matt Cowley:

Absolutely. And who knows? You could talk to people who I’ve asked these questions of and they could say, “He’s a bit crazy sometimes,” but I think that I listened to a podcast that says, I think it’s called Ologies and the host always says, “Ask really smart people dumb questions,” and so I don’t intend to ask dumb questions, but I’m always willing to ask whatever the question is for the sake of the student.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s great. And I think, again, that’s another good transition to my next question, which you’ve offered a lot of great advice and insights like just asking, but is there any additional advice you would give to other career leaders about funding unpaid internships or really leaning into cross-campus collaborations like you have?

Matt Cowley:

Depending on where you’re situated, cross-campus collaborations are often construed as the career center partnering with another entity within the Division of Student Affairs or some student success unit. And it’s the two educating bodies coming together to create some supercharged educational experience. And those things are beautiful and we do those things as well. But if you notice, the folks that I mentioned, it’s what I call the piping and the infrastructure of the institution, the people who make sure we all get paid like payroll, the folks who ensure that students have money to go to school, university scholarships and financial aid.

It’s the legal counsel, the folks who make sure that we don’t get into any legal trouble, right? Procurement, the folks who engage on a financial level with companies and organizations. And I could go on, but my point is that these are often not the student-facing entities that you’re having to partner with to do this type of work. And so sometimes it just takes understanding what’s important to those entities and how you can explain your needs to them, but also understanding how you might serve them as well. And I entered all of those conversations, or at least, I hope I did, with a lot of humility because I knew that I was not the expert on the things that I needed them to help me with or I wouldn’t have needed to bring them into the room, right?

But it’s a very different vibe than saying, “Hey, let’s partner with fraternity and sorority life,” right? All respect to fraternity and sorority life, those are great experiences that students also have a hard time articulating. And so collaborative programming with those groups is great, but talking to payroll folks or talking to procurement folks is nothing like talking to the people in fraternity and sorority life. And so it takes a different skillset. And so I would just say, if I’m talking to other career leaders who haven’t thought about that or who haven’t done that kind of collaborative work, just saying, “Strike out and try, but also understand that it is different in a lot of ways.”

Meredith Metsker:

As I start wrapping us up, is there anything else that we haven’t covered that you would like to add?

Matt Cowley:

No, but I think I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I’m only here because I want to be like Julia Vollrath. So Julia, if you’re listening, I’m only here because I want to be like you. For the listener who has no idea who that is, Julia has been on this podcast a couple times, but is a dear colleague of mine from University of Florida, and I spent about nine or 10 years at University of Florida, so just wanted to give her a shout-out. This will either make her smile or mortify her. So I can make sure we did that before the end of the podcast.

Meredith Metsker:

I love it. Julia is wonderful, and yeah, she has been on this podcast twice, at least twice, and she spoke at our Career Everywhere conference earlier this year. I call her affectionately the Data Queen.

Matt Cowley:

She is. Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Well, Matt, if people would like to connect with you or learn more from you, where is a good place for them to do that?

Matt Cowley:

If you just want to stay connected broadly and in general, LinkedIn is a great place to do that. If you have specific questions, I’m going to be honest, I don’t really love my LinkedIn inbox very much and so-

Meredith Metsker:

It’s a mess. Oh my gosh. It’s so hard to keep track of.

Matt Cowley:

Sometimes things sit there longer than I mean them to. So please be able to email me. My email is matthewpaulc@vt.edu. So it’s just M-A-T-T-H-E-W-P-A-U-L-C @vt.edu.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. And then for those watching or listening, I will be sure to include a link to Matt’s LinkedIn profile and his email in the show notes, so you can reach out to him if you’d like. Okay, so now I want to close us out with this Answer/Question, leave a question segment that I always like to do. So I’ll ask you a question our last guest left for you and then you will leave a question for the next guest. So our last guests were Dr. Josh Domitrovich, Rhonda Gifford, and Meghan Clister of PennWest and they left this question for you, “If you could instantly master any skill, what would you choose and why?”

Matt Cowley:

A couple things came to mind. One was just the ability to speak a different language, specifically Spanish. I think that English is great, but being able to speak more than one language and serve different populations would be amazing. The other thing I thought about was something related to AI. So to be honest, I was just in a meeting earlier today where they were talking about small language models. So we’ve learned a lot, over the past few years, about large language models, but they were talking about small language models and their ability to be a lot more effective and efficient in more niche areas. And so I think something with AI and coding and all of the things, the rumor on the street is that AI is coming for various sections of the workforce in one way or another. So I probably should learn something about it at some point.

Meredith Metsker:

It’s like learning another language.

Matt Cowley:

Exactly. Exactly.

Meredith Metsker:

When they pose that question, I also answered it for myself and I said. “Sleeping in any scenario under any circumstance, anytime.”

Matt Cowley:

There you go. I can already do that. People have asked me before, people say, “Well, what keeps you up at night?” And I’m always honest with people, “I understand the spirit of the question. The honest answer is nothing.”

Meredith Metsker:

“Nothing.”

Matt Cowley:

“Three minutes and I’m out.”

Meredith Metsker:

I am jealous. That’s amazing. Well, Matt, what question would you like to leave for the next guest?

Matt Cowley:

My question is, what is a skill or a piece of knowledge from a different field or discipline outside of higher education that you believe has been instrumental to your success?

Meredith Metsker:

Ooh, that’s a good one. I like that one. Do you know what yours would be?

Matt Cowley:

Honestly, right now, I’m currently in a theology program through Princeton Theological Seminary and I’ve learned a little bit about contemplative leadership. And so contemplative leadership does have broad applications, but it’s something that I had not heard of before and it’s helped me to slow down and be a different, if not a better decision maker because I tend to move pretty fast and so that has been helpful.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. Contemplative leadership. I have not heard of that one before. I’ll have to look into that.

Matt Cowley:

Yeah. Yeah, definitely worth to Google. I won’t try to explain it here, but definitely-

Meredith Metsker:

That’s another episode.

Matt Cowley:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Great. Well, Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the podcast today. This was such a fun conversation, great question at the end. And I think our listeners are going to take a lot from this and hopefully be inspired to do something similar on their campuses. So just thank you again for taking the time.

Matt Cowley:

Thank you so much for having me.