The first specific problem with internships instead of school labs is schools like to be a one stop shop so how do you guarantee everyone accepted into a school

The first specific problem with internships instead of school labs is schools like to be a one stop shop so how do you guarantee everyone accepted into a school will be accepted into at least one productive lab? Remember the only criteria for school entrance is a pulse and ability to get a guaranteed loan for a ridiculous amount of money. The odds that a physical school with X slots for chemists precisely overlaps professional demand for X chemistry interns is pretty low so either the private labs are going to be understaffed or there will be (profitable) students who can't get required internship places. The second problem with internships instead of school labs is the classic birth problem where we produce too many trained chemists for too few jobs. And flooding the labor market with free intern labor isn't going to help the fraction of grads who can get a job in the field. The result would be even more people with chemistry degrees doing anything other than chemistry as a profession after graduation. The third problem with internships instead of school is related to the second in that pre-med uses ochem as a weedout, or used to. So "most people" trying to learn ochem are trying to get into med school, no interest at all in learning ochem itself. That means the vast majority of chemistry interns are going to be pretty useless and unmotivated in the professional labs, so the few interns trying to become actual chemists are going to get ripped off by being ignored. Those are very chemistry specific problems but something similar might apply to many other subjects.