10 National Universities Producing the Most Interns

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President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness announced commitments from 45 industry leaders—including American Express, AT&T, Boeing, Dell, Facebook, General Electric, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Sprint Nextel, Sunoco, and Xerox—to double available engineering internships in August. The more than 6,000 new internships, according to the council, will be part of an effort to address a shortage of engineers in the country by providing "opportunities for hands-on, technical job experience."

With an extremely competitive job market facing them when they graduate, engineering majors—as well as  students in a variety of other areas of study—choose to supplement their coursework with internships, which give them an opportunity to get out of the classroom and into real-life work situations.

[See which schools were rated best for internships by peer institutions.]

At the 416 schools that provided internship data to U.S. News, 37.6 percent of 2010 graduates participated in internships as undergraduate students, on average. Of the graduating seniors at the 59 national universities that provided data, an average of 30.4 percent had internship experience.

The Washington, D.C.-based American University topped the list with 84.7 percent of its 1,515 graduating seniors in 2010 working as interns. University of Massachusetts—Amherst is the school on the top 10 list with the most graduates in 2010: 4,851. Of those graduating seniors, 57 percent—or about 2,765 students—had internship experience.

The highest ranked school on the top 10 list is Dartmouth College, a National University which ranked 11th in U.S. News's 2012 Best Colleges rankings. Of the 1,067 graduating seniors at Dartmouth, 72 percent worked as interns.

Many liberal arts colleges require internship experience as a prerequisite to graduating, so only National Universities were considered for this list. Additionally, schools that were designated by U.S. News as Unranked were not considered for this report. U.S. News did not calculate a numerical ranking for Unranked programs because the program did not meet certain criteria that U.S. News requires to be numerically ranked.

The table below highlights 10 National Universities with the highest percentage of 2010 graduates who worked as interns during their undergraduate studies.

Don't see your school in the top 10? Access the U.S. News College Compass to find internship data, complete rankings, and much more.

U.S. News surveyed more than 1,800 colleges and universities for our 2011 survey of undergraduate programs. Schools self-reported a myriad of data regarding their academic programs and the makeup of their student body, among other areas, making U.S. News's data the most accurate and detailed collection of college facts and figures of its kind. While the data comes from the schools themselves, these lists have no influence over U.S. News's rankings of Best Colleges or Best Graduate Schools.