Reasons for companies cancelling their internships?
The obvious one is that the company is running out of money (Yelp, Airbnb, Tripadvisor). However, there are companies that should be mostly unaffected (i.e. Comcast) that have also cancelled their internship. Why would they cancel if theyre not strapped for cash? The company Im interning at next summer seems to be doing well (probably better than before covid) but they havent confirmed that theyre keeping the intern program, which is making me anxious.
Because trying to manage interns remotely is a real pain and many managers donβt want the extra workload.
Maybe due to the general economic downturn, the company does not foresee as many full time headcounts opening up next year as they previously expected. Since the point of having interns is to hopefully convert them to full time, then thereβs no more point of having interns this summer
Going through a few internships myself, and mentoring interns at my current position, I really don't see how online internship can be beneficial much. This is unfortunate, because we do like when interns come back and joins us full time, but since internship is only few months long, adding online concept on top of it will really impact experience for both parts. You wanna see the company you're joining from within and learn from people in the team you assigned to as well as partner teams, it is still doable online, but just more of a high maintenance and time consuming.
Because interns are high overhead / high touch employees. We canβt babysit you if we canβt see you.
Only a few of ours are getting cancelled. The ones where they canβt travel to the US and thereβs no local entity we can hire them under. The latter is apparently a tax thing. The ones we can hire (for instance in our Canadian or European entities) will then just have to deal with remote management.
Because resources are also tight. Not just cash. It takes a lot of time an effort to put together a meaningful internship project. In general, interns are a short term negative return