Anxiety over “internship stacking” has become inescapable for Singapore’s younger generations. Fertility rates have plummeted to their lowest level ever recorded. These two things are related, actually.
Last week, the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) announced that it would be starting a pilot programme allowing some engineering and IT students to gain almost 2 years of internship experience before they graduate.
According to The Straits Times, this makes it the longest undergraduate work attachment in Singapore’s six local autonomous universities.
In other words, this 2+2 university programme is the latest salvo in Singapore’s long-escalating internship arms race, where it has become customary for Singapore students to internship stack as many as five, six, or even seven internships before they secure their first permanent entry-level roles.
It’s also another sign of how the hyper-competition for jobs is encroaching into the lives of Singapore’s youngest, in a way that I’d argue makes it genuinely difficult to be optimistic about the prospect of raising a child in Singapore.
What internshipmaxxing looks like
One recurring trope in the news is that doing just three or fewer internships increasingly makes one an uncompetitive laggard.
Take a look at this guy who plans to complete nine to ten internships before he graduates. Or this business student interviewed by Bloomberg about completing six internships before graduation. Or these students taking the unconventional route of internship stacking abroad.
To get a sense of how this happens, consider this potential pathway of the internship stacking student:
Students who enter tertiary studies at one of Singapore’s five polytechnics or its Institute of Technical Education (ITE) have the opportunity to pursue an internship as part of their studies.
If they proceed from ITE to polytechnic (as around 4,000 do each year), then they get another opportunity to do an internship.
If they then proceed to a local autonomous university like NUS, which administers 10,000 internships each year, one can internship stack through a variety of methods:
A credit-bearing two- to six-month-long faculty internship programme.
A vacation internship programme of up to three months between semesters.
Bear in mind that many students do multiple internships of this kind, something which holds particularly true for the brief internships happening outside of semester time. Also, students can postpone their graduation so they can do even more internships, many of which require students to be currently enrolled in university.
This new SIT pilot programme isn’t the only example of its kind seeking to extend students’ edge in the internship arms race. There are also examples like:
SkillsFuture partnering with local schools to do work-study certificates or diplomas for Singapore residents who recently graduated from ITE or polytechnic.
SIT’s new 2+2 pilot programme builds on an existing Integrated Work Study Programme that all undergraduates must take. Other universities, like SMU, also make internships a mandatory part of the curriculum.
Let’s not forget the slew of university programmes seeking to one-up each other with course-specific internship offerings like the Advanced Technology Attachment Programme or the Enhanced Professional Internship.
No country for young Singaporeans?
Internship stacking is a symptom of a broader cultural attitude towards youth and education that I find terrifying.
Inundated with the language of upskilling and meritocracy, education is now seen primarily as a system for sorting people into better or worse life paths, rather than a pathway towards new understanding or different perspectives.
The existence of 2+2 programmes (where one might find themselves spending more time in the office than at university), raises the question of whether universities are superfluous if they inch towards becoming platforms for your pre-job job. Or, as this Rice Media writer puts it: What’s the point of school if students are internshipmaxxing instead?
Youth becomes another frontier for hyper-competition, rather than a time when young people are allowed to just be. Hobbies and interests are worthless if they do not also contribute in some way towards future admissions. Extracurricular interests should also become extracurricular projects and advantages to pad one’s CV in the future competition for better schools, better jobs, and better lives. Time spent on unproductive interests is essentially time wasted.
I totally get why this mentality has become so entrenched. As a polytechnic graduate entering university, having an internship under my belt at a large multinational firm felt like it gave me a leg up against other uni graduates eyeing the same sought-after internships. I myself completed three internships before securing my first permanent role (albeit outside of Singapore).
These days, three internships is rookie numbers.
Something that isn’t spoken about enough is the exhaustion and pressure that goes into being a perpetual new worker on the bottom rung of a company, all while earning a nominal sum that isn’t enough to live on and continuing to pay tuition fees.
While some companies have established internship programmes where interns have a clear scope of work, fair working hours, and learning outcomes, many do not. The normalisation of internships in our labour structure also means that we have essentially normalised a permanent class of underpaid labour. It’s a dreadful circumstance that isn’t borne equally by people of varying levels of privilege.
And the sad thing is, all of this work is not translating to better employment outcomes for Singapore’s youngest workers. Or, as this op-ed puts it: “The fresh grad job is now a third-year job.”
ST’s Lin Suling notes that graduate full-time employment remains firmly below pre-pandemic levels. Alongside macro-economic shifts, it seems that the internship arms race has only increased the expectations that businesses have of new graduates.
All of this is late-stage capitalism manifest, a toxic combination that results from taking Singapore’s national ideology of meritocracy to its limits. As students grow up, they age out of extracurricular tuition and into extracurricular work attachments. All the better to prepare oneself for a lifetime of upskilling-competition-rinse-repeat.
Good at multiplication, not so good at multiplying
My grim prognosis is that, much like how Singapore’s intense meritocratic competition has only entrenched tuition as a normal aspect of our education system, the internship rat race seems set to become an enduring feature of the country’s labour system for the next generation.
Where does this end? Internships and tuition are just the start. There are also the highly sought-after and “cutthroat” university finance clubs, the Direct School Admission (DSA) academies for coaching students into top schools (charging as much as $750 for a three-day programme), the list goes on. The frontiers of hyper-competition are constantly expanding, as are the costs of keeping up in the rat race.
Yes, Singapore students are topping the charts when it comes to educational benchmarks, but at what cost?
Those same Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) worldwide studies, of which Singapore frequently tops the results, also indicates that Singapore students spend more time on homework than students of other countries. A 2017 study by the OECD found that 76% of students report feeling very anxious about exams, above the global average of 55% — an issue that has has been a long-running source of criticism.
This stress persists into adulthood. According to data from the Ministry of Manpower, the usual hours worked by employed residents each week has stood between 41 and 44 hours for the last decade. For context, the OECD average of usual hours worked each week in 2026 was 36.9.
An oft-neglected aspect of the (very overdone and very worn out) discourse on plummeting birth rates is that the prospect of raising a child in Singapore is less about giving life to a new human and more about engineering the perfect worker.
Yes, economic development has afforded newer generations more access to opportunity and luxury. But, it also has deepened fear- and anxiety-driven competition, also known as hustle culture, that is now encroaching more and more into the lives of young people.
Is it any wonder then that Singaporeans don’t want to make more?
In 2025, the number of births recorded fell to their lowest level since the country’s independence in 1965. With 29,864 babies born that year, this marks a 11.4% reduction from 2024.
This is not to say that there’s nothing we can do about pressure and hierarchy. Many of the recent moves aimed at shifting the nature of education in Singapore to recognise different forms of aptitude (and hopefully make it harder to tutor one’s way into success) are steps in the right direction.
The clamour and immense public interest for Teo You Yenn’s recently published book, exploring how anxiety and hierarchy shape parenting in Singapore, is just one of many signs that society is beginning to reckon with how exactly this meritocracy- and competition-at-all-costs mentality is hurting us.
And the growing volume of criticism towards how hyper-competition manifests is a sign that society increasingly recognises that something is off. The question now is how we turn this awareness into concrete changes for Singapore’s youngest workers.
Getting to a better place requires us to not only question the ways that we embed hierarchy and pressure into young peoples’ lives through national exams. It also requires us to question that value of entrenching a constantly expanding system of underpaid labour, such that an entry-level role might now require years of internship experience.