Why We Still Haven’t Solved the Unpaid Internship Problem

Gatekeepers of various sorts could help reduce the prevalence of these uncompensated positions, if they were willing. There appears to be no groundswell of college or university career counseling offices refusing to post unpaid internship listings and barring employers that don’t pay their interns.

“Higher education has been complicit,” said Carlos Mark Vera, co-founder and executive director of Pay Our Interns, an advocacy organization that lobbied the White House to make its change.

Then there’s the glaring issue of schools that offer course credit for internships.

Schools benefit from this arrangement in two ways, said David C. Yamada, a professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston and an expert on the rules around internships. First, intern-for-credit programs can allow institutions to collect tuition for that credit, even as students are working out in the world and don’t need classroom space or an instructor standing in front of it for four months.

Then, it allows a school to say it’s providing valuable career preparation. “If I hear another university invoke the phrase ‘Hit the ground running,’ I think I’m going to scream,” he said.

The gatekeeper with the most power here might be Handshake, a company you may have never heard of. In the nine years since its founding, more than 650,000 employers have used it to reach students for both internships and entry-level jobs, often via their career counseling offices. Unpaid internships would decrease pretty sharply if the company refused to post openings for them, thus cutting off the supply of ready labor to employers that wish to hire students without compensation. I challenged Handshake to throw down this gauntlet, and it declined to do so.

It is saying many of the right things, though, and doing at least some of them. “We believe unpaid internships shouldn’t be the norm, and we actively discourage them on Handshake because they often exacerbate inequities in early careers,” its chief operating officer, Jonathan Stull, told me in an emailed statement.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/your-money/unpaid-internships.html