Unpaid internships: opportunity or exploitation

Career Opportunities & Internships
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<p>Lje62: Some internships are with educational institutions, nonprofits and other places. It should be up to the individuals whether to take an unpaid internship, and not other people who want to decide for them. My daughter took two unpaid internships this summer, not for companies. She thought it was the best experience in her life. No one was abused, taken advantage of or exploited. Her mentor spent countless hours teaching her. Eventually she got to help with some research and was able to use equipment and techniques she could not get to use in any other setting. She thought it was just about the most perfect situation for her. Every day she thought she was living a dream. </p>

<p>There are quite possibly many situations where people are taken advantage of, but there are plenty where there are not. The job for my daughter wouldn’t exist if they had to pay her. She was happy to work for free for the learning experience.</p>

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In the kids’ HS, they have the option in the senior year of going on internships instead of afternoon classes. Several of them went to places like involving pharma, vet, accounting, etc. According to DD, none of her friends felt exploited, and if they had, they could just discontinue - it was an opportunity to see what the field was about and get some experience. Most of these for for-profit companies. If they had to pay to keep the students there, I doubt any would have volunteered. </p>

<p>Where does it end - when the intern has gotten the experience they came for and could move forward.</p>

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<p>of course… if everyone can’t do something, then no one should be able to do it.</p>

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<p>The law would disagree with that: minimum wage was established to set a baseline to protect individuals in a market like the one that exists today. Companies need workers, but there is a glut of employees, and as you get more desperate, you are willing to accept lower wages. I’m sure there are a few thousand people out there who would be happy to accept payment of $4.00 an hour instead of the $0.00 an hour they get as extremely long-term unemployed individuals whose unemployment insurance payments have expired. And if a company can hire someone for $4.00 instead of $7.25, knowing the quality of work will be the same, it makes sense to hire the cheaper employee. The minimum wage protects employees during times like now.</p>

<p>There seems to be a serious misunderstanding of the word “internship” that contributes to this problem.</p>

<p>If an unpaid internship is truly an unpaid internship as defined by law, the company derives no meaningful benefit from the intern, so there is no reason to pay him/her. However, if the “intern” is doing things that can otherwise be done by a paid employee, it means that the company is deriving benefit from the intern, and the intern is deriving less benefit than he should be.</p>

<p>If you hire for a company that is looking to develop someone in the industry, provide educational benefits to the person, give insight into how the industry works, and do this solely for the sake of the person (to a lesser extent, for the sake of potentially hiring someone who knows the way the industry works in a few years), then knock yourself out and hire an unpaid intern. If you hire for a company that is looking for someone to file papers, get coffee, or do other tasks that would normally be done by a paid employee, hire a paid employee, and call him whatever you want.</p>

<p>My point is that today, high achievers looking at the exact same job description will be more likely to take the job that is called an “internship” than the one that is called a “job.” This misrepresentation of the word “internship” a) devalues true internships in the eyes of employers, and b) creates a giant loophole for companies to exploit a young, desperate student population.</p>

<p>Put another way, call a duck a duck.</p>

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<p>Unpaid internships are most valuable in industries where it’s who you know, not what you know. Escorting guests from the green room on a talk show?-yes, OK, you might make some contacts. Making copies for a law firm?-not so much. If it’s a position that the student found without any input whatsoever from the school, and it’s not for credit, go ahead and take it. I’d be pretty PO’d if my kid’s school hooked them up for an internship at a law firm where all he did was make copies and tried to pass it off as part of the educational experience.</p>

<p>Two anecdotes from my experiences in the engineering field. When I was in college, I worked over the summer at local engineering firms, in a paid position. My sophmore summer I found a job at a very small (7 employees) firm, initially as a rod man and later doing some drafting-but there were also days that I spent seeping out a warehouse that my boss owned. The following summer, I answered an ad in the school paper for a summer job at a different firm in my area, and they actually hired two of us (the other guy was my roommate). He did inspection work, I did some engineering work and some inspection work as well. I worked there over winter break, and I was going to in the spring as part of my senior project. The kicker was that even though the school did not want me to get paid, they wanted a fee from the company. My boss refused-he thought it was ridiculous to pay the school for my services. I did end up working there full time.</p>

<p>Fast foward several years, now working as an engineer. I see one of my former classmates at a career fair-she is now a professor there. We exchange contact information, talk shop, and she asks me if I can sponsor a senior design project. I turn her down initially, since I don’t see the point in paying the school to teach students. In addition, I explain that it would have to be a certain type of project-not too big, with a client who would be willing to have student doing the design. Eventually we found a project with a client who was ok with it (my regular staff couldnt touch it for at least 8 months due to our backlog at the time), that was small enough, and I put the students to task with the design. As someone mentioned earlier, it was most definitely a net loss for my firm. I spent a lot of time driving to meetings with these students, teaching them, and getting a design that we ended up redoing anyhow. I hoped to hire the one kid (out of four) who was clearly the hardest working one of the group, someone who “got it” when we were going over design concepts that were much more than any of the things they did in the classroom. Unfortunately he took a position closer to his home in north New Jersey. When I went to the presentation for all the seniors in the Civil Engineering department, I found out that some of the larger firms use the same project, year after year, at this school. It’s part of their recruiting process. We never sponsored another senior design project-too much work-though I have been there to guest lecture.</p>

<p>My old firm hired many interns for summer work. They all got paid, and some were later hired full time.</p>

<p>In most fields I don’t see the point of unpaid internships. I think there’s too much of Kramerica Industries from Seinfeld (“The Voice”) at some of these places-“a solitary man with a messy apartment which may or may not contain a chicken”.</p>

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<p>As said in #5, unpaid internships effectively screen for students from wealthier families who can afford to support the student. Those from poorer families are often limited to seeking paid jobs. So if a particular industry makes experience that is only found in unpaid internships very important for getting post-graduation jobs, it effectively is applying a family income / wealth screen (whether or not that is the intention), which makes entry into the jobs somewhat less meritocratic and somewhat more based on inherited socioeconomic status.</p>

<p>In the technical parts of computer companies, interns are paid, and do real work that is of value. I.e. an internship is a short term job. So it seems odd that, in many industries or types of work, an intern is useless (or even of negative value other than as a potential recruit later) and thus not worth hiring for pay. If the intern is just doing something like shadowing, then it does not seem like an internship should need to last more than a few days.</p>

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<p>I can understand an unpaid internship for certain industries, but Hollywood is a whole other animal!!! My DD went to a top tier school in the northeast and went through 7 total unpaid internships (most while in school). Some of these included the Ellen Degeneres show and a major reality show production company. There were dozens of other interns at these places and almost none of them rec’d job offers. There were kids from all over the world there, too. Major conclusion is exploitation at its finest. i think California had to enact some sort of law to control it. The only thing to get out of a Hollywood internship is contacts. It is really a networking kind of town - totally it’s who you know. DD eventually took an internship for 3 months with a late night talk show there. She loved it, but again no hope for a job offer. We even had to pay UCLA $500 to enroll in an internship course to be considered a student as most companies will only bring on enrolled students as interns and DD was out of school. She really had to work her contacts every day for a year to eventually land a job. The entertainment industry is not for the weak of heart!!!</p>

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<p>Yes, unpaid internships definitely exclude poorer students at the expense of wealthy students. … So does p.o.s. crumbling urban high schools, so do $50k private universities, so do SAT training courses. </p>

<p>If I was a college student again, and could afford to do an unpaid internship that would likely advance my career, I would do it. </p>

<p>For me, the key is looking at an unpaid internship as a ‘college course’, and not as a job. If you do it that way, it’s easier to swallow … and possibly far more valuable (in terms of landing a good job post-grad) than any one class.</p>

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<p>I cannot speak to the ethics of for-profit enterprises using unpaid interns or the fairness of parents’ ability to support their kids in unpaid positions, but in this job climate, students need to take the best jobs they can get. Here is my family’s story for what its worth:</p>

<p>My husband and I are both engineers and we had paid summer positions in industry prior to graduation.</p>

<p>Our daughter, after debating in HS '07, majored in Politics and worked three summers in unpaid internships before landing a paid position the summer before getting her MBA '12 and is now gainfully employed with great benefits. She worked for the Obama campaign in '08, in the state office of our US Representative '09 and did such a good job that they let her work for free in his Capitol Hill office summer of '10. Her excellent letter of recommendation helped land her a paid position with a Western State office in '11 and that led to her permanent position after graduation with another State office. It was expensive to support her but she was frugal and made the best of it and we are very happy with the outcome.</p>

<p>Our son is a HS senior and is a talented computer programmer. He worked last summer as a software developer with a local company for $15/hour and has been asked back next summer with a raise. </p>

<p>You can see in our situation the principle of supply and demand at work. Not a big demand for political science majors.</p>

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<p>This is a discussion currently taking place in my house. For three years, I have hosted externs for mini-internships for my business. D is about to fly to the west coast for a coveted externship. Yes, we are paying airfare and hotel for a one week experience. For the summer before senior year, we have advised that it will be better for her to take an unpaid local internship than the paid summer camp counselor position she has held for several years (that would be ok if she was going into teaching or a recreation position).</p>

<p>Something that i don’t think has been mentioned, some colleges are now offering “internship stipends” through an application process to help those who cannot afford to do an unpaid internship.</p>

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<p>While I understand that there is potentially a socio-economic divide here, because some students simply can’t afford to take unpaid internships, if such internships are banned, then all students will potentially lose out, because many/most companies will not pay such interns.
As several posters have noted, interns are not always a net positive for a company and probably the only fields in which paying internships would dominate are fields such as engineering, computer science and finance, where specific skills are often required and companies use internships to make decisions about permanent offers. For students in the humanities and many of the social sciences, unpaid internships offer a valuable opportunity to gain experience and contacts, something that can be quite difficult otherwise.</p>

<p>As a personal note, my oldest children all had unpaid internships that proved very valuable. In one case, after working in a specific field, my child decided against pursuing that field. In another case, the internship really did provide a valuable work experience that my child leveraged to get a paying job after graduation.</p>

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<p>But then does this mean that students from poorer families may not be able to afford studying those subjects (or others without significant major-specific paid internship opportunities), due to the necessary unpaid internships being unaffordable, and the difficulty of finding a job at graduation (more necessary for those from poorer families than for those from wealthy families) without having the unpaid internship experience?</p>

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<p>Wow! A parent that doesn’t use those annoying “DD” or “DS” and blather about how amazing their kids are. Thumbs up to you.</p>

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<p>I wish I had a great answer to this question. I think that no student is foreclosed from studying any particular subject and that if you have ability, initiative, drive and intelligence you can succeed (and unpaid internships are certainly not a requirement for getting a job). However, there are many things in life that are easier for students and families with resources, including ability to take on unpaid internships, connections that result in jobs, ability to pay for college etc. and I’m not sure that limiting unpaid internships will achieve much.</p>

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<p>Let’s be honest. Yes, wealthier students have a higher likelihood of being able to major in whatever they want and still being able to land a decent job, due to family connections, etc. … It really depends on what a poor student wants from college. Do they want a chance to learn, and possibly get a chance for a job in an highly-competitive, lower-paying interesting field, such as advertising / media / public relations / politics? Or is the poorer student simply looking to college primarily to escape poverty? If so, then they absolutely should major in nursing, accounting, engineering, computer science, etc. Not as ‘exciting’ of fields by a long-shot, but fields with a much easier and more likely path to the middle-class life.</p>

<p>Life is often about trade-offs. Longshot chance at an interesting job, or nearly-guaranteed chance at a fairly uninteresting, well-paying job? </p>

<p>I know lots of wealthier students who were able to wait several months post-graduation to get a job that really interested them. And the poorer students had to take the first job they could get, even if it’s not what they wanted to do.</p>

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<p>What this does mean is that if, as an employer, you look more favorably on new graduate applicants with unpaid internship experience, you are favoring inherited socioeconomic status in your hiring criteria, whether or not that was the intention. Unless your definition of merit for the purpose of the job you are hiring for includes that criterion, you may want to re-evaluate how you look at unpaid internship experience when hiring new graduate applicants.</p>

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<p>what does it mean if, as an employer, you look more favorably on graduates from higher ranking schools? Graduates from these schools generally come from households with parents that have higher incomes. You are favoring inherited socioeconomic status in your hiring criteria, whether or not that was the intention. Unless your definition of merit for the purpose of the job you are hiring for includes that criterion, you may want to re-evaluate how you look at high ranking school experiences when hiring new graduate applicants.</p>

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<p>Re: #57</p>

<p>Yes, that may well be the case for school-prestige-obsessed types of work like [url=&lt;a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”&gt;Bloomberg - Are you a robot?]finance[/url</a>] and management consulting. It is much less the case for engineering and the computer industry, where school prestige is a much smaller factor, especially for jobs after the first one (lots of people from non-flagship state universities, and I don’t mean UCLA).</p>

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<p>I disagree with the notion that, were the law to be enforced properly, internships would disappear for everyone. Why? Because the companies who would be forced to pay their “interns” were not offering “internships,” they were offering jobs that they did not want to pay for.</p>

<p>It’s beyond ridiculous that two companies can offer two identical positions, but if one calls the position an “internship,” it is going to get dozens more applications than the one offering a lousy “summer job.” </p>

<p>There is nothing wrong with a true unpaid internship - it is a predominantly educational experience, and so students may look at it like just another course. But an “unpaid internship” with the value of “you’ll get connections” is not an internship at all and should not be treated as such.</p>

<p>If a TV network were forced to pay its “interns,” you are correct that it would hire fewer interns… but it would hire more employees. The work won’t magically do itself now that nobody is there to do it for free.</p>

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<p>Also, this law would favor big businesses specifically. So i’m surprised the government hasn’t gotten behind this idea yet!</p>

<p>Picture two computer companies. A local tech start-up and Google. Google can easily pay their internships $7.25/hr, adhering to the “feel good” liberal minimum wage law. So rich people will flock to California, make minimum wage and get their parents to buy the apartment while the kid pockets the $5,000. </p>

<p>On the other hand, the small business in your neighborhood will close all internships because they can’t afford to higher any more workers. So now the poor student who cannot afford to live away from home doesn’t have any small tech-startups in his area to work for.</p>

<p>Look up the history of minimum wage. This is what it has done before and if expanded to internships will do the same. The US government, red and blue, favors big business.</p>