OPINION: Unpaid internships hurt low-income students

There are only a few weeks left in the spring semester, which means it’s time to focus on finals, make summer plans and find an internship. That means constantly refreshing Indeed.com, waiting on emails from Human Resources departments for multiple eternities and wearing business-professional more than ever. But it will be worth it when you get the internship, right? After all, research consistently shows that students who graduate with internship experience perform better in the post-grad job market, and many entry-level jobs highly prefer internship experience. It seems that at least one internship is a requirement for the post-recession college graduate, and the more internships, the better for job prospects.

The issue is that many of these internships are unpaid, which is immoral on two levels: Unpaid internships devalue student labor and also discourage class mobility. It is time to retire the model of unpaid internships and give interns a living wage.

The unpaid internship has gained popularity in the 10 years since the economic crash and resulting recession of 2008, and the practice is especially prevalent in fields like media, politics and fashion. The U.S. Department of Labor defines an internship as an educational program that provides practical experience to beginners for a limited, agreed-upon amount of time, and states that a for-profit company can offer unpaid internships if they provide the intern with “beneficial learning” and do not give the intern responsibilities that would otherwise be done by a paid employee. These regulations are loosely defined and even more loosely regulated, and speaking from anecdotal evidence, many unpaid internships masquerade as learning opportunities while really being free labor from eager college students.

Here we get into the economic issue of valuing what one pays for; if an intern is essentially a volunteer who can, at best, add to a company’s value, or at worst, take up an extra chair in the office, why would their employer be interested in their work or professional development? They offer no economic risk, so the company feels no need to ensure that their work is good. Meanwhile, interns are taking an immense economic risk by giving up the time they could have spent at a paying job in hopes of exposure or connections with an employer that most likely does not care about them and their needs.

Of course, every internship varies in its requirements, schedule and level of intensity. And the main goal of any internship is, ostensibly, to learn. But this model is outdated and all too easily exploited by employers. Most importantly, the proliferation and growing expectation around unpaid internships is systematically pricing out low and middle-income students from the prestigious careers they desire.

A brief example: A student wants to work in the film industry. He or she was accepted to USC, worked hard in class for two years and is now looking at summer internships. But to pay for rent and food in Los Angeles, where many of these internships are located, they need a few thousand dollars. Here they have a choice: get an internship, take out a loan and hope that it benefits their career down the road, or get a paying job. The job would most likely be unrelated to their career goals and pay minimum wage, but if they cannot afford to spend a summer leaking money, they may not have much of a choice.

Millions of students from low-income (meaning “do not have four thousand dollars laying around”) families are faced with this predicament every spring, and it makes sense that many of them choose to take a job at a coffee shop or summer camp instead of pursuing the internship, because it is simply not economically feasible. Surely, some students can make it work, finding a balance between paying work and an unpaid internship or finding an internship that offers a stipend, but these examples are rare and do not invalidate the brokenness of the unpaid internship system.

The individual choices — to offer internships without pay, to require internship experience for entry-level jobs and to not consider the economic needs of poor and middle-class students — all add up to give yet another advantage to wealthier students. Because they do not have to worry about making living costs for themselves over the summer, they can easily take unpaid internships, and when the time comes for job applications, they will have the most impressive resumes. Of course an employer would choose a candidate with three completed internships over one with three summers’ worth of minimum wage food service or retail work. But securing internships is not necessarily a sign of competency or talent; it is, more than anything, a signal of economic privilege.

If the trend of unpaid internships continues, young professionals from low and middle-income families may be effectively priced out of the fields that they worked hard in school to join. This will only add to the existing homogeneity of creative and political fields, which can damage our media and policy for an entire generation. Neglecting to pay interns may seem like an inconsequential economic choice, but it is incredibly impactful, and it is time for companies to recognize that impact and make a change.