SHENYANG, July 26 (Xinhua) -- More than 700 students in northeast China's Shenyang Urban Construction College were finally allowed to go home for their belated summer vacation, after nearly a week of nightmarish internships.
Mostly information engineering and mechanics majors, the students said the internship was arranged by their college and directly linked to their credit points. However, they were assigned posts that had nothing to do with their majors and were given poor accommodation, with confused management.
All the students were crammed into a room of no more than 150 square meters for training. More than 300 students had to share a room with just two small fans working in the night. Cafeteria staff did not serve enough food, and some of the students suffered from vomiting and diarrhea.
The frustrated interns posted their woeful experiences on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like service, which soon caught public attention.
The provincial education department of Liaoning released a statement ordering every college and university in the province to suspend all summer internships.
Following the statement, Shenyang Urban Construction College posted a statement of apology to the students, their families and the public, admitting its internship operations were inappropriate, promising to compensate students.
At the same time, a vocational college in Sichuan Province was exposed in the media for forcing over 500 students to do assembly line work some 1,500 kilometers away, saying the internship was obligatory for graduation.
Qian Jingfeng, a vocational guidance expert in Shanghai, said such internships were often private arrangements between companies and college teachers. He said internships involving intensive labor or basic skills could hardly be beneficial to students' employment after graduation and were a roundabout way to ease labor difficulties in certain companies.
Internship opportunities are scarce in China, with some students pointing out that they can be more difficult to find than an actual job.
On the one hand, the skills college students learn at school are mostly divorced from practice at work. But on the other hand, companies are often not willing to offer pre-work training to interns, according to Qian.
"For some posts that require strong skills, it takes at least one or two months for an intern to master the skills, by which time the autumn semester will start," an HR specialist said.
Liu Jianping, a former Communist Party of China chief at Tianjin University and now a national legislator, has brought attention to the issue of college student internships for three consecutive years at the national "two sessions."
He said there were three reasons behind the internship chaos.
Firstly, there was a weak understanding among Chinese that college student internships were the common responsibility of the whole society.
Secondly, there was a lack of laws and regulations to enforce proper internship activities.
Thirdly, there was a lack of supporting measures and preferential policies to encourage companies to receive college students as interns.
"The legislature should work to introduce laws and regulations to safeguard college students' rights of internship. The national education spending should set up a special fund to cover insurance for interns and training expenses for companies," Liu said.
"Other government sectors such as social security, industry and commerce administration, legal aid and education can also chip in to form an organization that offers consulting and information services to college students looking for an internship."
(Liu Yelin, Liu Xinyi also contributed to the reporting.)
