The Univerity of Detroit Mercy has an intigrated non-profit office. Students have the chance to work as interns in the office after their third year of school. It is also an excelent learning tool to see the day to day operations. I dont know if that is what you are asking, but it may be close

I saw a lecture about the Detroit Community Design Collaborative that Detroit Mercy has about two weeks ago - they're doing really amazing work and is worth looking into. Unfortunately their website is so-so as far as navigation, etc.:

http://www.arch.udmercy.edu/dcdc.htm

The Frank Lloyd Wright school/cult does this at Taliesin West, but it seemed kind of creepy.

it that such a bad idea on school giving hands-on practices to students, even with good pay?

i'm at the boston architectural center at the moment, and when I started my first year there, I had to look for a full-time job in an architecture firm weeks before the semester started because the industry is not as good as before and there are not a lot of jobs out there. it was tough, therefore talks among my fellow classmates that the school should have an in-house studio began in order to help students who has such difficulty; since working full-time, finding real like experience and problem is one of the school's requirement/curriculum.

of course this fell through beause we could never find enough students to file this to the school.

i guess working for the school has been a bad experience for all?

this is done in turkey. planning schools do general plans for client cities that are mostly get adopted. also, architectural projects. professors were banned fron private practice for a long time. great policy for architecture schools. sci arc was set up in early days so students could work tuesdays and thursdays in offices.

i didn't mean banning the profs from private practice is great policy. real office programs in schools are great policy. correction.

plymouth or portsmouth in the uk used to have a unit that worked students on their year out.

They did a lot of lottery funding applications in the late nineties, which meant that whilst the projects were "live" in some ways the students did not get paid until funding came through and in some cases this never happened.

thus the two guys who were running it were accused from some quaters of being unproffessional and basically abusing their positions as educators etc etc

but this sort of thing goes on in proffessional practice all the time!

rural studio?

i would say Detroit Mercy or Taliesin West are your best bets for real experience, or you might try Lawrence Tech or the BAC if you want to hang around a bunch of 'real world' [consequently, i have no idea what the heck that means] minded people. Michigan does a few community oriented design studios that design real stuff, as well as design charrettes in Detroit that do a lot of great things in conjuction with the local gov't but they don't generally get consideration by the city.

At UPenn there is a project called PennPraxis (everything there is called "Penn____" as if its normal to make "Penn" a prefix) - its run by the professor who teaches professional practice, and the idea was to get small projects either through the universtiy or whatever, and complete them as a collaboration through professor and student. Its new, and I have been out for a year, so I dont know how successful its been, but you can check http://www.design.upenn.edu/pennpraxis/