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The labor market is broken and no one really understands why or how to fix it.
Sometimes economists deploy different matching experiments on JOE to see if we can make some headway on our own broken labor market, but it's worse than ever.
I'm expecting us to circle back to nepotism as the default.
I honestly wonder if technology has made the matching function too thick.
For example, in a standard job market matching model, a thicker matching function is always better because you can select from a greater pool of applicants.
But the model doesn't account for the cost of evaluating applicants. If you have too many applicants, your standard methods for sorting through them may start breaking down.
Maybe things are moving earlier because on the job-seeker side, it's what they feel like they have to do to stand out from the crowd.
On the employer side, if they can get a good enough pool of interns early, it reduces the need for them to do costly sorting of a greater universe of applicants (even if some in that greater pool would be better)
That's my sense, on both counts.
They've tried things like giving econ applicants a limited number of signals that can be sent to employers to indicate especially strong interest and letting both sides ordinally rank their top 10 preferred match partners.
Introducing prices somewhere in there could help with the volume problem, maybe even some sort of auction mechanism.
Maybe things are moving earlier because on the job-seeker side, it's what they feel like they have to do to stand out from the crowd.
There's also filtering value, for both sides, in getting the interns in-house earlier.
Less wise, too, would be my guess.
The economic forces which are driving the rat race earlier into peoples' lives would be an interesting one to explore. I'm not sure I fully understand it deeply.
At the surface level, it feels like a prisoner's dilemma. (I gotta get my kids these high powered internships early because otherwise they'll fall behind.) But that still doesn't explain, what changed? between now and 30 years ago?