
In a recent opinion piece published in ARCHITECT, NCARB CEO Michael Armstrong makes the case for an accredited four-year architecture degree, calling for “an additional, more affordable entry point into the profession.”
Mr. Armstrong argues that reducing the cost and time needed to pursue a license will help make the profession more inclusive. “While the time to complete NCARB’s programs has declined by 20% over the past decade,” he writes, “the time to earn an architecture degree has remained the same,” adding: “Now the academy needs to do its part.”
The profession and the public may very well benefit from the reduced education requirements of an accredited four-year degree. Architecture education can be improved, and creative ideas about content and timing are welcome. Yet Armstrong’s emphasis on a four-year degree obscures the much larger issue when it comes to making the path to licensure more accessible and inclusive: the amount of time internship still takes. Despite the recent decline, a process that was intended to last three years continues to average over twice as long.
The Boyer Report, a landmark study published by the Carnegie Foundation (full title: Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice), identified the shortcomings of internship nearly 25 years ago. In 1996, based on 30 months of research and interviews, the report’s authors identified “internship [as] perhaps the most troubled phase of the continuing education of architects," noting that the success of internship “appears to rest on the goodwill and resources of the employer.”
The structural challenges of the Intern Development Program (since renamed the Architectural Experience Program, or AXP) were also highlighted in a groundbreaking 2003 study, published in The Journal of Architectural Education. This study, funded by NCARB and the California Architects Board, identified the conflict at the heart of the internship process: the need for interns to gain new skills, and the competing incentive that employers have to use interns’ existing skills most efficiently. “Although these conflicts of interest are well known, the structure and administration of the IDP does nothing to address them,” wrote Beth Quinn, the study’s author, who is now a senior research scientist and director at the National Center for Women & Information Technology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Quinn acknowledged the difficulties faced by NCARB in her study, but concluded that “the problems of IDP may not be correctable.”
Since that time, NCARB’s most significant change to IDP/AXP has been to eliminate the longstanding requirement of 1,860 elective hours. That adjustment, in 2015, has largely driven the 20% reduction in the average time needed to complete AXP that Armstrong rightly celebrates. But it fails to resolve the conflict at the heart of the program. Much work remains for the profession to make good on the promise of a three-year internship.
To that end, it’s important to recognize a key distinction in how oversight works in architectural education as compared to internship. In other words, to understand who makes the change. The National Architectural Accrediting Board was created over 80 years ago by the ACSA, AIA, and NCARB to oversee the accreditation of architecture schools; in the 1970s, voting representatives from the AIAS and the public were added. Those membership organizations jointly govern the conditions and procedures of accreditation. Every five years—most recently in 2019—NAAB convenes a national conference to give stakeholders the chance to raise issues and shape the future of architectural education.
Contrast that with internship. Only NCARB makes changes to AXP. Other organizations have been invited to participate on an “Experience Advisory Committee,” which last year was restructured as the Licensure Advisory Forum to cover all aspects of the licensing process. But as these names suggest, the role is advisory at best, without any formal decision-making power or responsibility.
Since IDP/AXP became a required part of NCARB’s certificate process in 1996, there has been no national gathering with all the relevant stakeholders to discuss how the program’s requirements and outcomes can be improved. In that time, NAAB has organized at least six such meetings, which typically have been followed by substantial changes to the NAAB Conditions and Procedures for Accreditation, the document that governs the accreditation process. Any substantive proposal for a four-year accredited degree would have to be raised at the next Accreditation Review Conference, scheduled for 2024.
Before agreeing to participate in the next ARC, the collateral organizations should insist on holding an equivalent AXP conference specifically to review and update that program’s guidelines. Such a meeting could be informed by the internal data NCARB has been gathering and analyzing, as well as by substantive efforts of other stakeholders to describe a shared vision for architecture internship that more effectively balances access to the profession with standards and requirements appropriate to the current practice of architecture.
The continuing disconnect between the age-old promise of a three-year internship and the actual reality is a symptom of the structural failure of architectural internship, which has been exacerbated, rather than resolved, by AXP. This structural failure was central to the Boyer Report’s findings a quarter-century ago, was further detailed in Beth Quinn’s 2003 empirical study, and it remains a primary challenge and obstacle for access to the profession today.
Read the response by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture to Armstrong's column here.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
Call for Submissions. We regularly publish opinion columns that we think would be of service to our readers. Have a timely, relevant, and unexplored perspective or experience to share with the design community? Email [email protected] with a one-paragraph pitch. Due to the volume of submissions we receive, we are unable to respond individually to every pitch.