Internships are a popular way for students to learn valuable work related skills while also getting their foot in the door at a corporation of their choosing. While many interns are paid for their work or at least granted a stipend, the unpaid internship is a fixture of college life.
Students in the social sciences flock to unpaid internships working at non-profits, political offices and news publications because they perceive the experience of working for these outfits as vital not only to their college experience but also to their future career.
In this process of working for experience rather than money, students are harming themselves and the labor market.
First, by working for free, students are telling employers that their labor is not valuable. Remember, internships vary from five to 40 hours a week and many approach full time employment.
Working these kinds of hours without any compensation except for “experience” signals that students don’t take their skills and time seriously in the context of a capitalist free market. Keep in mind, we function in an economy where hiring and pay are largely determined by skill.
Certainly, nepotism and affirmative action skew this metric but in a majority of situations it is an applicant’s ability that secures them a paying job. And the fact that it is paying is important because exchanging your skills and time for nothing but a letter of recommendation is a reflection on how you view yourself in a job market.
Remember, if companies weren’t able to dupe a student into photocopying, answering phones and writing internal memos for free, they would have to hire a paid secretary to perform these tasks. In any other economic system, this demand would give the applicant leverage to secure meaningful compensation for their time.
But this isn’t only about the individual college student and the fact that they’re getting ripped off by corporations. No, college students accepting and even clamoring for unpaid internships affect everyone by devaluing labor and making it impossible for students in some areas to trade their skills and time for compensation.
For instance, a political science major would be hard-pressed to find a paid internship in a political office and it is almost impossible to find one on Capitol Hill. Instead, there’s intense competition for unpaid internships in politics making it almost impossible for a student to find a paid position.
These unpaid internships may teach students the ins and outs of the political system, but they make a political education almost impossible for students who have to pay their own way through college. Without income through the internship, students have to take on second jobs, rely on family or go further into debt in order to gain a firsthand political education in the nation’s capital.
This trend is repeated throughout many disciplines as students who have to pay their own way are priced-out of internships. This turns a job market based on merit and ability into one based on wealth and connections.
Of course, in some instances, unpaid internships may be necessary for a particular field of study such as law but as an overall trend in education, unpaid internships should be discouraged.
The difficulty is that many colleges and universities have incorporated unpaid internships as part of their curriculum, encouraging students to basically perform volunteer work for credit. But while a student’s labor can teach them many things through work experience, employment should be considered primarily an economic question and only secondarily as an aspect of education.
Treating work as an economic issue rather than an educational one will prepare students for the reality of their time after college, when securing a job is based on your skills rather than your willingness to work for free.
On the whole, unpaid internships distort the job market, price many students out of positions in competitive fields such as politics, and reinforce an unrealistic understanding of post-college work. Universities should encourage students to secure the greatest monetary gain possible for the skills they possess, rather than support the exchange of hundreds of hours of labor for little or no material gain.
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I hope you don't stand by this position. An unpaid internship doesn't distort the market, it is part of the market.
ReplyDeleteMuch like school, the benefit you receive is in the education. Gain does not simply have to be monetary; in fact, monetary gain really isn't the final gain. Money is simply a means to achieve a real benefit--i.e. a new iPod. Similarly, the education and experience you receive in an internship is an intermediate gain.
The pricing mechanism also works here: student who value the internship the most will take it; students who would rather accept paid internships will take the paid internships.
I recognize that internships have educational value and that this value can be part of the market but I feel that universities have over-promoted unpaid internships to the point where students in many fields have no choice but to take an unpaid internship.
ReplyDeleteThere is little educational value in working as an unpaid intern and fulfilling the role of secretary at a political campaign or a local business. What distorts the market is that schools are promoting these unpaid internships and making them part of the curriculum in many disciplines.
Students should instead be taught that their skills and time have a monetary value on an open market.