The government’s rules put colleges in a bind. A group of prominent college leaders quickly wrote a letter to the secretary of labor protesting regulation of internships, assuring they took “great pains to ensure that students are placed in secure and productive environments that further their education.”

Almost half of all internships provide credit, but elite schools, whose credits are valuable currency, are sometimes reluctant to award them for internships. Yale, for example, has a stated policy of not awarding credit for internships to undergraduates. Columbia’s policy says it gives unpaid interns “registration credits,” which don’t count toward graduation and as such aren’t really credits at all. While Harvard undergraduates can’t get credit for internships alone, they can make them part of credit-granting independent study.

Ivy League interns are, presumably, in demand. For less prestigious institutions, denying credit could jeopardize internships, which provide a crucial bridge to the workplace. Getting tuition while students learn on the job is a good deal for colleges financially, but it also creates new oversight responsibilities that, research suggests, many colleges are ignoring.

Intern Bridge, a recruiting and consulting company, surveyed 8,939 undergraduates at 234 colleges who had been interns. Of those getting credit, only 15 percent reported that an adviser or faculty member visited their work site; 41 percent were not required to submit documentation about the experience; and 33 percent did not receive a formal supervisor evaluation. For noncredit internships, oversight was usually an afterthought: a majority of colleges require no documentation or evaluation of any kind.

This should not be surprising. Because contemporary notions of academic freedom grant professors wide latitude to teach what, and how, they like, most colleges haven’t developed systems to objectively evaluate student learning in individual courses. They can, however, rely on the academic culture of the institution and the general professionalism that goes along with scholarly credentials. With internships, no such built-in safeguards exist. Some colleges and universities require interns getting credit to write an essay and complete coursework related to the internship, while others rely only on a supervisor evaluation — or, as the Intern Bridge research indicates, nothing at all.

Supervisors, moreover, aren’t educators, and receive no training in evaluating learning. Internships sometimes come with a grade, a chunk of which is based on a one- to two-page form filled out by a company supervisor — evaluating attributes like dependability and punctuality on a five-point scale (check a box, from “outstanding” to “unacceptable”) and a few general characterizations of the quality of the intern’s work. This is a far cry from the rigorous examinations and thoroughly graded essays that characterize the best college courses.

The college internship as we know it today has evolved into an awkward marriage between organizations with very different missions. Both sides are offering something of legitimate value — from the workplace, experience and connections; from colleges, credits that lead to degrees — even as they also help their bottom lines. Students, meanwhile, are faced with a system whose rules vary widely among different colleges, or even departments within colleges, as they try to reach a goal that can be all too elusive: a good job that pays a good wage.