Sustaining Equitable Access to Work-Integrated Learning: Three Cycles of a Digitalized Placement Arrangement at a Saudi Public University

Work-integrated learning is a main route through which higher education contributes to the skills and employment goals of SDG 4 and SDG 8, yet whether access to placements is complete, timely, and equitable, and whether the arrangement that produces them outlasts the people who built it, has received less attention than what students learn. This intervention-based information systems case study, predominantly quantitative in its evidence, follows the placement of business students at a Saudi public university, where most workplaces are gender-specific, and women form the majority of the cohort, across the first three cycles of a placement platform the college specified and deployed. The platform’s complete record of 1747 participants, 3113 requests, and 1417 placements is analyzed against four expectations drawn from the literature, with a documentary analysis of the college’s dated responses and a user evaluation (n = 120). Across the cycles, the share of participants placed rose from 64 to 94 percent, and the mean time to placement fell from five to eight weeks after the semester start to one. The gender gap moved rather than simply closing: at launch women were placed later and less often than men; by the second cycle the unplaced shares were equal; by the third, timing among those placed was equal while the smaller male cohort was more often left unplaced. The department-curated list of hosts held more seats than the cohort yet supplied only half to three-quarters of placements; a reviewed route for student-proposed hosts supplied most of the rest, and about half of the proposals named local organizations the college did not know; and the coordinating unit moved from program-level lists to written rules that cite the record. The study contributes a measure of equitable access computed from a placement record, a test of an institution’s picture of its hosts by what it supplies rather than the seats it holds, and an assessment against a published definition of a sustainable governance arrangement, which finds one of three conditions met, one not evidenced, and the decisive one, operation under different people, untested.