The U.S. News Short List, separate from our overall rankings, is a regular series that magnifies individual data points in hopes of providing students and parents a way to find which undergraduate or graduate programs excel or have room to grow in specific areas. Be sure to explore The Short List: College and The Short List: Grad School to find data that matters to you in your college or grad school search.
Many schools hail internships as a great way for students to supplement their academic and theoretical classroom study with practical experience. At Clarkson University in upstate New York, for example, real-world experience is at the heart of the school's educational programs, and at three of the schools within the university, completing a "professional experience" is a prerequisite for graduation, according to the Clarkson website.
Perhaps that's part of the reason why Clarkson topped the list of National Universities with the highest rate (86 percent) of graduating seniors with internship experience. Of the 330 ranked colleges and universities that reported internship data to U.S. News in 2012 for the graduating class of 2011, an average of 36.9 percent of students held internships at some point in their undergraduate studies.
At the 48 National Universities--a U.S. News ranking category that encompasses large research institutions--that provided internship data, that average was a bit lower: 29.6 percent. But among the top 10 National Universities for student internships, half of which were on the East Coast, an average of 62.3 percent of students held at least one internship.
Schools designated by U.S. News as Unranked were excluded from this list. 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.
Below is the list of the 10 schools that produced the largest percentage of interns among the class of 2011:
|National University (state)||Bachelor's degrees awarded (2010-11)||Percentage graduating with internship experience||U.S. News rank|
|Clarkson University (NY)||603||86||115|
|Colorado School of Mines||669||81||77|
|Dartmouth College (NH)||1,076||72||10|
|Clemson University (SC)||3,443||67||68|
|Pace University (NY)||1,481||65||174|
|University of Pittsburgh||4,212||59.9||58|
|University of Memphis||2,680||52||RNP*|
|Syracuse University (NY)||3,122||50||58|
|DePaul University (IL)||3,463||45.3||134|
|Stevens Institute of Technology (NJ)||485||45||75|
*RNP denotes an institution that is ranked in the bottom one fourth of its rankings category. U.S. News calculates a rank for the school but has decided not to publish it.