'Tern Limits

Unpaid internships restrict a lot more than a student’s cash flow.

By Yael Julie Fischer
Tuesday February 21, 2006

So, what’s your dream job? Senior Advisor at the White House? An editor at the New Yorker? President of a thriving non-profit? Hollywood executive?

As young people just starting to navigate the working world, it quickly becomes clear that just to get hired for the bottom-rung, minimum-wage jobs that might one day get us to the top, we need connections and hands-on experience. Basically, we need to have had unpaid internships. Working for free may be hard but, today, everybody’s doing it. Unpaid internships do offer perks; the priceless connections, the priceless exposure, and perhaps most priceless of all, the opportunity to get a job in your field of choice. For those tough to break into careers, the unpaid internship offers a certain stepping stone in uncertain terrain. This is all well and good, if you have money.

The majority of today’s students do not have spare money lying around. Most students live on a tight budget; we need cash for fun, for essentials, or for tuition. Asking us to fill our resumes by emptying our wallet seems like an awful lot to ask. A USA Today survey of unpaid interns revealed that over 60% had parents earning more than $100,000 a year. Only about 20% of all families of college students earn that much. For most students, working for free is just too expensive.

Accessing higher education is supposed to open the doors to merit-based opportunity. It is supposed to let everyone, in the immortal words of Marlon Brando, be a contender.

Unpaid internships are termites eating away at the wooden pillars of the promise of a true meritocracy.  Too often, only those who could afford to work for free gain the necessary exposure to get jobs after graduation. Such internships plant class-hierarchy right back into a system that should be working hard to weed it out. Goodbye meritocracy, money calls the shots here.

Moreover, interns tend to lose out in the free internship scenario. It all boils down to who makes the investment. In a paid internship, the employer makes the investment, turning the student into an asset. Shelling out those dollars means the company will see to it that you get trained and your skills get utilized. When a company places value on the student, the internship rises beyond mundane tasks and becomes a meaningful experience. In the unpaid internship, however, the student makes the investment, budgeting that their experience will yield a benefit worth the cost. The company, however, loses nothing if you spend all day filing; or cutting clippings out of every daily newspaper in the state when Lexis-Nexis can generate the same information automatically.

What’s more, companies that do not pay can over-hire. And they do. In the nightmare scenario that I have experienced, interns compete with one another for limited resources, like computers, or they compete simply for enough tasks (interesting or otherwise) to fill the long workdays.

Some universities try to alleviate the problem by offering college-credits for unpaid internships. That idea still fails to adequately compensate students. First, while the credit is an improvement over being offered a big fat nothing, college credit is not cash. A college credit isn’t paying for your books, or your ticket to that new Ben Stiller movie or for those new shoes.

The second problem with the college credit system has more to do with the college and less with the student. Many colleges require more work for a class granting credit for an internship than a regular class. One typical scenario is requiring a lengthy term-paper in addition to a 15 hour-a-week unpaid internship in return for 1 academic credit. Like any good New Yorker I know a bad deal when I see one and that’s a bad deal. The work far exceeds the compensation. For students living on a strapped-budget this won’t do.

What will do is monetary compensation. Students gain a lot through internships, but they also have a lot to offer. Their skills and talents deserve recognition and there is no reason they should be exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Most employers recognize the questionable legality of unpaid internships, which is why no official statistics exist on the number of such positions. Students deserve to earn minimum wage for their work despite the glamour of the job, both because students’ skills warrant compensation and because the educational opportunity of an internship should be available to all, not just to those whose parents can bankroll them or who have the time and wherewithal to hold down other paid jobs on the side.

Paid internships also make good political sense. In 1971 Lewis Powell, a conservative and soon to be Justice, wrote a memo noting that universities contained outlets for liberals but none for conservatives. Endow professorships, Powell suggested. Create a lecture circuit. Start scholarly journals. Wealthy individuals, like Joseph Coors and John Olin, contributed substantial money to actualize Powell’s dreams and so was born the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist society and the Olin Institute.

Today, conservatives outspend liberals four to one on research. This outspending yields conservatives an edge in the war of ideas. Liberals tend not to spend their money this way. They invest more in social causes and generally worry less about creating a solid infrastructure of liberal thinking. Recent events, however, prove the need for such infrastructure and so liberals are investing more in think tanks and more in media outlets. But, what about the next generation of thinkers? What about, hopefully, the next generation of leaders?

The Heritage Foundation built a top-notch, fully-equipped, eight-story building to house (largely paid) interns in Washington D.C. who were working for conservative think tanks. The merits of providing housing for interns extend from making internships financially feasible to creating an easily accessible social network. Living on the cheap in one building not only makes internships more affordable, it also creates social ties between future conservative leaders. Interns can talk about ideas in the state-of-the-art gym downstairs or commiserate over liberal policies while watching a movie in the auditorium. This is networking at its best: bring to town the most qualified conservatives from across the country and let them hang out with each other. A good idea is a good idea and liberals need to start doing the same.

Currently, liberals trail in the war of ideas. This is temporary but we need to take action to turn the tide. We need to shake things up. We need to fix what isn’t working. A good place to start is by making progressive internships available to all qualified candidates regardless of financial circumstances. That’s as progressive an idea as they come.

Yael Julie Fischer graduated from Barnard in May 2004 with a dual major in American Studies and Religion. She is currently working for the Virginia Liaisons Office.

Intern positions with Campus Progress are part of the Center for American Progress’ internship program. Internships at the Center are paid.

Illustration: Matt Bors