Some college students and recent grads now paying to get unpaid internships!

<p>"With paying jobs so hard to get in this weak market, a lot of college graduates would gladly settle for a nonpaying internship. But even then, they are competing with laid-off employees with far more experience.</p>

<p>So growing numbers of new graduates — or, more often, their parents — are paying thousands of dollars to services that help them land internships.</p>

<p>Call these unpaid internships that you pay for.</p>

<p>“It’s kind of crazy,” said David Gaston, director of the University of Kansas career center. “The demand for internships in the past 5, 10 years has opened up this huge market. At this point, all we can do is teach students to understand that they’re paying and to ask the right questions.”</p>

<p>Not that the parents are complaining. Andrew Topel’s parents paid $8,000 this year to a service that helped their son, a junior at the University of Tampa, get a summer job as an assistant at Ford Models, a top agency in New York...."</p>

<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/business/09intern.html?_r=1&em%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/business/09intern.html?_r=1&em&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>I think it is immoral for for-profit companies to hire unpaid interns… and it’s even more immoral for other companies to charge money to place unpaid interns at for-profit companies!</p>

<p>how is it any different than parents sending kids to private schools or financing very enriching programs for the kids? </p>

<p>What’s wrong with companies that have the need for interns but lack funding to hire them giving unpaid internship position to students are are willing to work unpaid for experience? That seems to be a good match. Why is it so different than kids doing volunteer work to build their resume? </p>

<p>That said, I am a stickler for meritocracy, and if I were a top HR executive in those firms, I would never get unpaid interns from these agencies. Rather, I would open up the unpaid internship selection process, get students who apply individually, and award the position strictly based on merit. The aspect of wealthy kids buying their way into the unpaid internship while other deserving kids without financial power do not even get to build their resume as an unpaid intern just irritates me to no end. </p>

<p>I have no respect for the companies that get unpaid interns in this manner as it is the epitome of sloth (a business version).</p>

<p>Wow. My kids will not even do unpaid internships. They have to earn money and only have done paid ones that pay enough for them to live away from home, even if they do not net money after that. So, at the opposite extreme, there is no way I would ever pay for an internship or a service to land one. </p>

<p>For that matter, my kid just ended her internship for the summer (again, a paid one) and was offered a bonus of one month’s pay for having done a good job. So, in her case, she was paid for NOT working! Opposite extreme from this article, LOL.</p>

<p>PS…I am not against unpaid internships. But I would be against paying to obtain one.</p>

<p>One more thing…I did not realize the article is talking about college graduates. We do not support our kids after college or grad school graduation (nor in summers if they live away from home and they always do). So, I would not be paying for my kid after graduation to get a job, let alone an unpaid job. They are expected to start supporting themselves. And so far, I have one who just graduated and has supported herself starting as soon as she graduated (and she lives away from home).</p>

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<p>It’s rare that a for profit company can’t scrape up 6 bucks an hour for an intern. They are not saving the world or helping the community - they are in the business of making money. That’s why the legality of unpaid internships has been debated - and why so many <em>require</em> students to get college credit. Having people volunteer at a for profit company just seems wrong to me - this is an intelligent, partially college educated workforce that companies want to volunteer their time.</p>

<p>From [Bates</a> College | A Note About Unpaid Internships](<a href=“http://www.bates.edu/x25901.xml]Bates”>http://www.bates.edu/x25901.xml) :</p>

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<p>I just feel like it’s not good for the company since they cut themselves off from a lot of qualified applicants that don’t have the luxury of working for free. It’s not good for the student because their labor IS worth something and they deserve to be compensated for it.</p>

<p>Some colleges are trying to level the playing field by offering funding for students’ unpaid summer internships. See [Smith</a> College: Academic Programs](<a href=“http://www.smith.edu/acad_specialpraxis.php]Smith”>http://www.smith.edu/acad_specialpraxis.php)

This way students who, because of finances, have to work for money during the summer, need not miss out on an internship experience. </p>

<p>Soozie, gotta say that your D’s experience of earning a bonus from her summer internship is a wow. She is some impressive young woman IMO.</p>

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<p>I still think it’s bad, but at least the fee includes two months of housing and food, and that can be pricey if it’s in a place like New York City.</p>

<p>Soozie, there are a lot of fields where an unpaid internship is much more of a career booster than a paid job- I’ve got nieces and nephews who have interned on the Hill, staffed Senate sub-committees, worked as researchers at Think Tanks, etc. When interview time rolls around for full time jobs, the interviewers want to talk about that experience, and not the time they’ve spent scooping ice cream, folding sweaters at the GAP, or working as receptionists and secretaries-- all of which they’ve done to pay the bills and keep themselves fed and housed.</p>

<p>Is it fair? no. Can a kid get a career track job in public policy or government relations or economic development without one of these internships? Probably… but it’s damn hard these days. Most of the kids I know who are now working in solid, career track jobs in these fields had to resort to unpaid internships at one point- just to have some content related work to talk about. Brookings or CFR or the World Bank don’t really care that you worked as a file clerk at the UN last summer for minimum wage. They REALLY want to talk about the project you worked on for Senator blah blah researching microfinance and its impact on sustainable agriculture.</p>

<p>So don’t knock the unpaid internships. They are a necessary evil in many fields. It would be great if everyone could land their dream job without them, but it’s just not the way some fields work.</p>

<p>but blossom, the internships you mentioned are for non-profits or government. We are talking about corporate unpaid internships, which just boggles the mind.</p>

<p>Blossom, I think you may have misunderstood me or I wasn’t that clear. I am all for unpaid internships!!! I am NOT for paying to do them as the article discussed! My kids have done very low paying internships and I would also not be opposed to unpaid ones except in their case, they have done them away from home and we do not pay for their summers while in college and so they have had living expenses and so while they are not looking to profit, they do have to cover the expense of taking the internship if it is away from home (all of theirs have been away from home). </p>

<p>However…let me explain a few of them so I don’t make it out to be that they were looking to MAKE money as what they were looking for was the EXPERIENCE as you have described. They just could not afford for it to COST them money for that experience and we will not fund summer experiences now that they are in college. </p>

<p>D2, summer after freshman year, got a summer stock job at a small Equity theater in another state. Her official position was “intern”, though she was in their professional shows but not paid as the other professional actors were paid. She was paid next to nothing per week but was given free housing and so her measly stipend went toward food and the internship did not cost us money and she, nor we, cared about her coming away with a profit. Since then she has worked in her field every summer in NYC, but her jobs have all been paid and she doesn’t have intern status and actually is paid quite well. </p>

<p>D1 has had three internships in the past three summers in her field, architecture. The first one was in Paris and did not pay a lot but paid enough to cover her housing, food, and incidentals. We had a frequent flyer free ticket and allowed her to use it to get over there. She did not make a profit but the job did not cost her money. Second internship was in NYC and that one paid a decent amount, enough to cover her expenses of living in NYC and she had a little left over at the end. The third internship is one she found in the French Alps this summer. She likes the experience of being in another country as a plus on top of the great internship experience in her field (and can travel around Europe on her weekends or when the internship ends). While she found the internship on her own, it did not pay enough to take the job. However, her grad school, MIT, (this ties in with jyber’s post!!) has an office called MIT France, which will help fund summer internships and the like and so MIT paid for my D’s flights to Europe and supplemented her internship salary enough to make the wage enough to live on all summer and that is how she was able to take a low paying internship but not have it cost any money at all to do so. It was a very nice plus on her last day that her boss gave her one month’s salary as a bonus however and so now she did make an unexpected small profit! She says she plans to likely work overseas the next two summers of grad school knowing that MIT will help fund such experiences for her. She was going to maybe work on an architecture project as an intern in Rwanda this summer but needed it to be completely funded in order to do so and applied through another office at MIT that also funds such internships but was unaware of yet another office that had an application for such funding and it was late and so she did the France internship instead but may look into the Rwandan one next summer by knowing all the offices at MIT that helps to fund such internships (again, she found all the internships on her own independently but MIT helps with funding as Smith does in jyber’s note). My D’s internships in Paris and NYC were prior to her attendance at MIT, however.</p>

<p>Again, while an unpaid internship is valuable experience, my D not only has worked for private firms, but we cannot afford to pay for her internship experiences away from home. She doesn’t care if she makes a profit but must cover the expense of living wherever the internship is located. She has now gained three valuable internships in her field and has two summers to go before she graduates with her MArch degree. It has worked out great and has not cost us any money, nor would we pay for such experiences past the high school years. My other D has worked in her field (theater) every summer during college and it has been away from home and has not cost us any money. At this point, she is actually making a profit after her living expenses in NYC and she is only 20.</p>

<p>It is illegal for companies to hire unpaid interns based on fair labor law if, 1) it’s not a work study (student earns college credit), 2) if what an unpaid intern is doing is in lieu of what a paid employee could be doing (taking away jobs).</p>

<p>I have provided a link a while back. Many major firms will not hire unpaid interns. I had a lot of family and friends’ kids offered to work for me this summer for free. Our legal would not permit it. I referred a student to do a work study at my friend’s law firm for a month. It was in conjuction with a course she is taking at school. They took her, but still insisted on paying her the minimum wage. It was worth it to them not to violate any labor laws.</p>

<p>My daughter just did an unpaid internship, in DC for the government, and while I was not thrilled we were in the end glad she found something in this economic climate. She did the internship for 10 weeks and got paying jobs for another 4 weeks of this long break.</p>

<p>But I would never pay for her to have an internship (although we did have to contribute toward her housing in DC this summer). Once she grew too old for camp and summer programs, we stopped paying and it became her responsibility to figure out her summers. There is a point when your kid needs to direct his/her own life and not depend on mommy and daddy to shell out $8000+ for the summer.</p>

<p>But what really irks me are the companies that fill their internships with these kids. It means that my daughter, or your son, who might be well qualified for an internship, and really passionate about a particular career, can’t even get their foot in the door just because we’re not willing to, or can’t pay, $8000. It bothers me that they are so willing to abdicate their duties to find their own employees and agree to only hire affluent kids. </p>

<p>I don’t hire people. But if I did, I now know about this and would want to investigate more deeply a resume from a new graduate and think twice about hiring someone who only got an internship because daddy paid $8000 for it. </p>

<p>And I think it’s great when colleges offer stipends for students doing unpaid internships. Brown does too.</p>

<p>Many of these internships are incredibly sought after and competitive with or without pay. I’m surprised it’s taken so long for us baby boomer over achieving helicopter parents to use money as a means to get their kid prestigious internships!</p>

<p>More often than not many of these internships require a connection, no matter how loose a connection it might be. All the neighborhood kids who want to go into finance or business of any sort contact my husband by the middle of their sophomore or junior year in college for his company’s internship. We’ve had relatives of friends of friends call us trying to give my husband their connection to his firm asking for an internship. It’s so funny, he’ll come home and say do we know so-and-so and who is he/she and why do we know them. If I can’t figure it out then it’s too distant a connection.</p>

<p>My daughter had an internship her last quarter in high school where they never hired a high school student before (only college grads) and you definitely needed to have a connection to get in. They hired her because her connection was so prestigious (fate is funny) they couldn’t say no. In the end they were so happy and she surpassed so many of the college students that they mailed her a large check to cover the time she worked there. It was quite an experience for my daughter but she couldn’t believe that kids had to work two jobs so they could do an unpaid internship in hopes of future employment and then didn’t do a great job.</p>

<p>Connections can surely help. I have to say that every job and internship my kids got…they got by their own initiative and had no connections. D1 also interned one summer with an architect in our town while still in high school and got a small stipend. I just want to say that it IS possible to land internships in one’s field, paid or not, through one’s own initiative and it is not necessary to have connections (though I don’t deny that connections are nice to have). For D1, none of her internships were advertised positions and she simply wrote to architects she was interested in and asked about interning with them.</p>

<p>"I just want to say that it IS possible to land internships in one’s field, paid or not, through one’s own initiative and it is not necessary to have connections (though I don’t deny that connections are nice to have). "</p>

<p>Very true. However, if people are willing to pay big bucks for an internship placement service, there will be plenty of people who’ll offer such a service.</p>

<p>I agree…there will be plenty who obtain internships through connections (such as through their parents) and some who will pay for such opportunities. I just want to emphasize that there will be plenty of kids like mine too who find internships independently and their parents are not paying for the experience. So, don’t lose hope. ;)</p>

<p>As someone who hires people on the Hill, please don’t discount that real experience of “folding shirts at the Gap.”</p>

<p>MSUDad…both experiences have value for different reasons. Folding shirts at The Gap is a good experience in terms of a student earning spending money and also simply experiencing the job world and holding a position of employment for the resume and for the real world experience. An internship in one’s field of interest or potential career field is valuable experience in terms of learning on the job in a hands-on position and also as a resume builder for future employment upon graduation. I feel that my D having work experience in her field on her resume keeps helping her to attain the next job and hopefully will help when she graduates grad school too. Making money at the internship is not the goal as much as the experience in the career field.</p>

<p>We were thrilled with our son’s unpaid internship at a non-profit in Serbia this summer. They did provide a furnished apartment but we picked up the rest of his expenses. His college, Grinnell, is another that provides money for unpaid internships, but we decided we could afford to support him in this and leave that money for someone who really needed it. He had never had a job before so the experience was extremely valuable on many levels.</p>

<p>I got a chuckle out of this, from the article:</p>

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<p>First of all, it’s the College of William & Mary, not “William and Mary College.” Second, that school happens to be one of the most prestigious and well-thought-of schools in the country! And I’m surprised that an intern, who’s probably college age, wouldn’t know this! Also, “colleges like his”? As if the kid is going to Cashier Training Institute! Too funny.</p>