To followers of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, an internship in 1998 may have meant presents of Walt Whitman books and illicit sexual relations, but to most college students it meant a regular way to spend time away from school. And for employers, it meant a regular route to find new employees.

In its annual survey of 1,004 college seniors at 105 colleges and universities across the country, Vault.com found that 77 percent of all college seniors had completed at least one internship by graduation and 55 percent had participated in two or more internship programs before they graduated. This represents a 6 percent increase over the 73 percent internship participation rate in 1997 and an astounding 25-fold increase over the 3 percent participation in 1980.

"Just ten years ago, an internship was considered only a useful enhancement to your resume," says Vault.com co-founder Mark Oldman. "But with today's golden job market, we are seeing an internship craze. Students and career-changers are using internships to sample life at the best companies without committing themselves for the long term." The survey was conducted through written and telephone surveys.

The survey was conducted from February through April 1998.

The leading names in corporate America are also recognizing, like never before, the benefits of offering internships. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Kraft General Foods, Bertelsmann Music Group, and Northwestern Mutual Life are increasingly looking to their own interns to find permanent employees. Northwestern Mutual Life, for example, more than doubled the number of interns to whom it gave full-time positions last summer, with nearly 200 interns joining the insurance company.

"The new employees we get from our internship program are substantially more productive and successful than those from any other recruitment source, according to a study we've done," said Michael Van Grinsven, Northwestern Mutual Life's assistant director of recruitment.