Internships are some of the smallest jobs a person will ever hold. Ranging from eight to 12 weeks of narrow responsibilities, these positions often prevent workers from exercising free will or finding truly fulfilling work. 

Yet students treat summer internships as a litmus test of their employability, a referendum on their leadership potential and a preview of how they’ll fare in the labor market the moment they receive their diploma. 

Unlike the standards of equity typically championed in higher education spaces, I argue that unpaid internships act more as class dividers than equalizers, taking place early in one’s career to provide select people with a head start before a single day of full-time work. 

This dynamic is complicated by a lack of industry protections. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a for-profit internship can be unpaid if the intern is deemed the primary beneficiary, a baseline choice that doesn’t require compensation. Given these loopholes, employers take advantage of college students’ youthful enthusiasm and offer unpaid positions in the opportunities market under the glamorous guise of an introduction to firm culture and workspace.

These concepts are not new to us. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued in his 1986 foundational essay, “The Forms of Capital,” that economic capital quietly converts into cultural and social capital. Though money can be accumulated over years of hard work, the qualitative, intangible assets intrinsic to people and their communities are far scarcer.

Under Bourdieu’s grasp of networks and interconnected class advantages, knowing the inner workings of a field allows inherited advantages to be relabeled as “personal merits.” Parental figures’ networks seep into the job search process as the primary means of establishing contacts, tightly rationed by limited access and family wealth.

However, the compounding effects of privileges make the ugly truth disappear from the story. Common intern hotspots like Washington, D.C., New York and San Francisco exhibit a polarized geography between a high-end professional powerhouse and a low-wage service class that keeps the city running.

These cosmopolitan places concentrate on the essential functions of the world economy through finance, law, media and politics. The internship students take on at age 20 are the entry rung into that command stratum, working as a sorting machine that gives preferential treatment to those from well-off backgrounds.

With nepotism and asymmetrical resources between elite institutions and “non-feeder” schools, meritocracy is by no means the only criterion for selecting candidates for these short-term roles. But the most decisive filter isn’t a family connection or a university name on a résumé. It is the unpaid offer itself.

USC has not pretended that the problem doesn’t exist. Our bandage to the structural wound is mostly issued through the Career Center, which runs a small set of awards aimed squarely at this gap: the Impact Scholarship, the First-Generation Scholarship, and Dream Dollars for nonprofit and government agencies. Nevertheless, they are only modest sums awarded to a small pool of individuals.

All of these phenomena were true before the federal government made it worse. The shadow looming above us is cast by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2025. Most of its student-aid provisions will take effect July 1, just in time for the summer we’re now living through.

The OBBBA made unpaid internships even more of a luxury good. By tightening Pell Grant eligibility, the administration strips funding from students whose other grant aid already covers their full cost of attendance and severely underestimates their financial need. On June 16, the Trump administration announced that it would scatter the long-standing responsibilities of special education and civil rights to agencies that have shown little interest in protecting at-risk students. Without sufficient backing from the highest office in the country, students who pay for their own college tuition and even work to support their families will be more challenged than ever, forced to take on internships and early-career roles that would pay off their debts before pursuing their dreams.

To get to the bottom of all of this, we have a series of repugnant negotiations to fight through, including employers who continue to decline to pay and an administration that treats shrinking opportunity as a budget line.

Nevertheless, those of us who see the machine for what it is must refuse to bend. As a first step, we can participate in coalition-building to draw attention to the serious underpay.
Some advocacy groups are already making headway. For example, Pay Our Interns, founded in 2016 by two formerly unpaid interns of color, found that before 2017, only about 10% of congressional interns were paid. Their lobbying and fundraising efforts opened new opportunities for young public servants to enter the field without being burdened by the below-minimum-wage earnings common on Capitol Hill.

We must acknowledge that a summer internship is not a measure of talent, and call for more university funding mandates, demanding age-related reforms in state minimum-wage laws and litigating with the Department of Labor for class actions to close these gaps.