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In the wake of a growing debate over unpaid internships, it’s worth our time to take a closer look at both the benefits and the unfavorable parts of companies offering opportunities for experience to young professionals, but with a catch: you have to work for free.
Internships have become a staple of a college student’s resume. Enrollment at universities is continually increasing (along with the cost) as more and more jobs require degrees at entry-level positions. It’s no longer enough to have decent grades and a degree from a respectable college; companies want to hire workers who already have experience before they even enter the professional workforce. Ever seen an “entry-level” job posting that requires three years of experience? If you haven’t, you wouldn’t be hard-pressed to find one with a little digging around in employment postings.
So the answer to this phenomenon has been internships for college students, an opportunity to get that much needed experience to boost their resumes and help make themselves more marketable fresh out of college. But a fair amount of these internships are unpaid. And we have to ask ourselves: do the negative consequences outweigh the benefits?
To get the biggest complaint of unpaid internships out of the way: providing free labor really seems to go against the ideals of a capitalist system. Arguing the value of labor and its worth may seem like a socialist or communist argument on its face, but when you really take a look at it, working for free undermines the idea that capitalism and the American Dream is built on: if you work hard, you should see the fruits of your labor.
Of course, there is the flip side of that argument, which is that the experience is a similar benefit of a wage when it gives you a leg up on your competition in future job markets. The benefits are more long-term, even if you have to sacrifice to begin with. However, there is distinct difference in who can afford to make that sacrifice for the long-term benefits and who cannot.
College students are already pressed for time, trying to fit in class, extracurriculars, and often jobs into their schedules. There’s only so many hours in a day, and adding an internship on top of all of that can really wear down on a person, if they can even find time to take an internship to begin with. Students who have no choice but to work during the school year in order to make rent and put themselves through school likely do not make enough of a wage to cut down on hours at their paying jobs, due to the decreasing real wages of workers, and they simply don’t have any time left to sacrifice. It’s not that they don’t want to get the experience from an internship, it’s that they literally can’t afford to work for free. In this way, unpaid internships filter out lower class students from these opportunities and can even hurt them in the long run when it comes to the job search after school.
In addition, in some fields, the only way to get a paid internship is to work your way up to one. Again, a worthy goal—to someone who can afford to make the initial sacrifice. And while all students of poorer backgrounds are affected, students of color are disproportionately affected.
However, unpaid internships are on the decline. According to Fortune.com, unpaid internships have gone from being 50% of all internships in 2012 to only 43% in 2017. The numbers also show that the decline is due to students choosing to not to take these positions. But what would a world in today’s day and age look like without them?
To make all internships paid would lead directly to a decrease in the overall internships offered. This would affect certain areas of study, namely, the liberal arts, much more harshly than science or engineering fields. (Anybody else friends with a 20-year-old engineering student who makes $45/hour this summer?) Private companies in STEM fields generally have more money to throw around, and can offer their interns a respectable wage, so they likely wouldn’t be affected by the change. But other fields, like Political Science, would see a sharp decrease in internships overall. Many internships there are for candidates running for office, who aren’t going to waste precious campaign funds on interns when they could shift the position opening to “volunteer” just as easily to function the same way unpaid internships previously had. This is just one example, but the principle is applicable across many liberal arts fields.
Experience for graduates entering the workforce would also decline as a result. Is it worth it to have a seemingly less prepared workforce in order to combat the inequalities of the current system? That’s a matter of opinion, no doubt, but I’m going to try to make the case for my own position, which is: Yes, it’s absolutely worth it.
Let me start by saying internships have not always been around. Society survived before them, and they can certainly survive getting rid of the unpaid ones. In fact, society survived a large portion of the workforce entering with only a high school degree for decades. Today’s business world is different, as most well-paying jobs require a college degree, but is additionally requiring experience for even entry-paying jobs what’s really best for the workforce? By filtering out a significant portion of the college graduate pool that could not afford to take these unpaid internship positions, talent may be falling through the cracks of the hiring process because of a disadvantage the individuals had no control over.
Second, companies would also probably be better served if they chose to spend more time training their employees themselves rather than relying on their previous experience. Unpaid interns can have responsibilities ranging from doing all the companies paperwork to being glorified coffee-runners. Companies today do train new hires, but more thorough training of new hires to what their companies specifically want can incur less of a learning curve and less of an adjustment period.
Other than some practical benefits, the most important reason I think unpaid internships do more harm than good is because they further the economic inequality gap by privileging certain people over others based on something that they cannot control. We should be inclined to combat these kind of practices in favor of making sure that both college students and graduates have similar opportunities so that talent and work ethic are what stand out. Students don’t control the background they come from that would allow them to be able to take an unpaid internship. However, they can control how hard they work, and they should have the opportunity to display that despite their financial situation.
Internships have their benefits, both for the individual and for the workforce as a whole, but asking people to work for free while profiting from their labor is unethical. Paid internships are a great opportunity, but a little tougher to obtain. Students should not be turning down unpaid internships because they cannot afford to take them, in turn cutting off their chance at upward mobility towards a paying position, because of something trivial.
The internship debate is far from being over, and it will be interesting to see how the system moves forward. There’s reason to both sides of the argument; whether you fall on the liberal or conservative side of the political spectrum, you can see why the other side thinks the way they do on the issue. I hope I’ve managed to argue my position well, for anybody who is undecided or on the opposing side, to at least understand where the opposition to unpaid
internships comes from. Either way, it’s important that we look at these issues critically, and not simply take a side without considering all of the factors. I encourage everybody to research more on this topic if they’re interested.
Special guest writer:
Bailey Markowski, The Ohio State University
https://twitter.com/BaileyMarkowski?lang=en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bailey-markowski-338214173/