Decades of concerns expressed by design practitioners about a disconnect between what universities and colleges teach academically as "architectural education," and what the design profession actually needs as a knowledge base from architects entering practice have been highlighted during the past decade by the Boyer Report (1996), the NCARB Architecture Practice Analysis Study (2001), the ArchVoices Internship Summit, and numerous ACSA and AIA presentations. Academicians and the National Architectural Accrediting Board have defended their curricular approaches to design professionals' education by pointing to the continuing interest in entering architecture schools. Practitioners have frequently argued that newly-minted graduates too often lack both pragmatic technical skills such as the ability to accurately draw wall sections or to understand "how buildings actually go together," and wider "critical thinking," research, writing, client interaction and management skills that would enable the graduates to grow into proficient design firm leaders.

Both academicians and practitioners have looked to the internship process as the locus for closing the gap between the academy and practice, and both have winced away from taking full ownership and accountability for why increasing numbers of interns have opted not to take licensing examinations, and/or to withdraw from traditional architectural design paths into alternative careers. At the same time, the relative numbers of graduates taking licensing exams have plummeted from two decades ago, and the profession is barely creating enough newly licensed architects to keep up with the numbers of practitioners withdrawing from practice annually.

Proposals for shortening the internship period, enabling students to take portions of the examinations prior to graduation, better training mentors capable of overseeing internships, more clearly designating educators within firms to oversee both internships and continuing education requirements, and the elimination of internship completely have been bantered, debated, and tabled irresolutely. Yet all the discussion has produced little tangible to improve intern learning - changes in internship processes in California and Texas have not yet proven harbingers of a widespread inclination to restructure a process that interns find frustrating and unsatisfying, academicians deem remote and superfluous to prepare students for, and practitioners consider burdensome and ineffective in truly turning motivated graduates into seasoned architects. What can reasonably and effectively be done to improve this experience for all involved?

One potentially effective replacement for the current system would be to collapse the internship interregnum into either the academic, or the professional experience, to assure greater accountability and consistency of experience and outcomes. With thousands of American firms participating in overseeing interns, and fewer than 120 professional schools providing accredited architectural education, it would be far more efficacious to focus on the professional schools as the site of such consolidated internship experience. With NAAB's national oversight, and regional accrediting bodies self-analytical strictures available to guide and constrain the focus of educational internships, the pedagogy and curricular foci of internship could be refined and coordinated to assure national consistency in standards. But where would appropriate and sufficient access to real-world practice emanate from? Very few regions have, or are capable of supporting Boston Architectural Center-like, fully accredited schools of architecture - indeed, only the BAC, Drexel, Cincinnati, Northeastern, and the Frank Lloyd Wright School come to mind as progenitors of this practice-based pedagogic approach to design education. This absence leads to the key idea here, i.e., that local AIA components could become clearing houses for supporting and assisting in placing upper-level design school students in firms where their practice-based learning could be integrated with their academic learning before the students have graduated.

Very few local chapters now interact directly with their local design schools. Yet it is in the chapters' long-term interest to do so, as these students ultimately will become the new registered members of the chapters once they become licensed. Chapters often serve as informal employment clearing houses, and many have some considerable expertise in linking practitioners and available work. Local dues directed toward supporting the emergence of the next generation of practitioners could hardly be more wisely spent, and the national AIA could provide templates for assisting firms in evaluating the learning progress of interns within the firms. In addition, the AIA's recent steps toward designating "teaching firms," similar to teach hospitals, would be facilitated by active involvement of local chapters with better knowledge of the capabilities of small and large firms than the national component might have.

Collapsing the intern experience back into accredited design schools which could oversee the practice-based curricula while working closely with local components on the placement of interns in effective practice settings, would close the current gap among schools, components, and firms. This structure would also build the trust and accountability that interns have sought for decades, and that the profession has needed in order to better educate its' next generations of practitioners and thoughtful leaders.