Employment Guide: Howard: Unpaid internships detrimental to students, market

Internships are a popular way for students to learn valuable work-related skills while getting… Internships are a popular way for students to learn valuable work-related skills while getting acquainted with a corporation of their choice. 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.

But 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 per 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 other preferential hiring actions skew this metric, but in the majority of situations, it is an applicant’s ability that secures him a paying job. And the fact that it pays is important because exchanging your skills and time for nothing but a letter of recommendation is a reflection on how you view yourself in the job market.

Remember, if companies weren’t able to dupe a student in photocopying, answering phones and writing internal memos for free, they would need to hire a paid secretary. In any other economic system, this demand would give the applicant leverage to secure compensation for their time.

But this isn’t only about the individual college student and the fact that he’s getting ripped off by corporations. No, college students accepting and even clamoring for unpaid internships affect everyone by devaluing 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, which makes it extremely difficult for a student to find a paid position.

Unpaid internships may teach students the ins and outs of the political system, but they make obtaining a political education almost impossible for students who have to pay their own way through college. Without income from 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 in 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 might 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. Although a student’s labor can teach him many things through work experience, employment should be considered primarily as an economic question and only secondarily as an aspect of education.

Treating work as an economic rather than educational issue 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.

E-mail Giles at gbh4@pitt.edu