<p>[Do</a> Unpaid Internships Lead to Jobs? Not for College Students
Jordan Weissmann
The Atlantic
June 19, 2013](<a href=“Do Unpaid Internships Lead to Jobs? Not for College Students - The Atlantic”>Do Unpaid Internships Lead to Jobs? Not for College Students - The Atlantic)
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<p>Paid interns are always going to be the schools top talent and more prestigious internships and thus more likely to receive jobs. Comparing the kids who can get paid ones vs the unpaid internships does not provide any meaningful contrast.</p>
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<p>You can’t compare and contrast different fields. Don’t be one of those tiresome CC-ers who think that the only internship / job worth having is in certain fields of finance.</p>
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<p>Nope. The article includes a graph showing that the distribution of GPAs is the same for both paid and unpaid interns.</p>
<p>I totally agree. I’m in finance. I don’t think its for most people, its insanely dry. I think an unpaid internship in a top tier marketing/PR/tech firm beats the crap out of the 26 dollar an hour finance ones any day.</p>
<p>But they broke it out by accounting further down. I can tell you with no degree of uncertainty that 100% of the best accounting internships are paid and always go to the top students who are certainly most likely to find jobs anyway.</p>
<p>I get that does not extrapolate exactly on all fields. But this study seem to imply that just having a paid internship is the ticket to a job so lets just pay everyone which is the fallacy I was pointing out.</p>
<p>GPA has nothing to do with top students across all degrees so your data point proves nothing.</p>
<p>The best defense for unpaid internships is nobody is forced to take one. If you feel your summer or free time is better spent as a lifeguard or waitroid do it.</p>
<p>That “defense” falls flat on its face when the internships become a PERCEIVED quasi condition to land a worthy first job. </p>
<p>Students, and often at the prompting of their parents, are now forced to add more and more notches to their resumes. </p>
<p>And, as last FYI, how many schools are there that consider the summers as the perfect season to EARN their expected student contributions. The problem with unpaid internships is that it reduces the availability of paid positions, and that it impacts negatively the folks who have the biggest needs.</p>
<p>My D chose a school where she could do unpaid internships during the school terms, saving summer for paid work. She felt her internships were helpful and made several connections that she maintained after the jobs were finished. She never expected that they would lead to permanent job offers. My S attends a co-op school and expects to have a couple of paid jobs through co-op, and does hope that will lead to a job offer after graduation. Time will tell.</p>
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Having some “work experience” is definitely necessary to land a “worth” first job. </p>
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Eh, there are points in here that I’d rather not touch. (Seems that you’re quite passionate about them.) But who is forcing students to forsake their summer earnings or an intership? Who is forcing a student to decide between an intership and a summer job?</p>
<p>Actually, who is forcing students to decide between an internship and a summer job are the employers. In many cases, employers will only hire students they have “tried out” first. In some industries – or some segments of some industries – they pay their interns, so it’s not such a problem. But in others that’s not the case.</p>
<p>And this is especially problematic when you look at companies and organizations that don’t hire dozens of new graduates every year, that are only going to hire one or two people sporadically. Those are often the kinds of jobs many students want most – not necessarily the highest paying ones, but jobs that involve creative work, or social justice work. This is really prevalent in non-unionized print journalism. And much of the time, all of the hiring of bottom-level professional employees comes from the ranks of unpaid interns.</p>
<p>These aren’t completely exploitative situations all the time. One kid I know spent months post-college working as an intern for a well-known investment management company. The company paid for his SEC licensure exam, and paid for his prep classes, too. He has effectively been promised permanent employment when the right slot opens up . . . but it has been a year since he started, and he hasn’t gotten a paycheck yet. (He’s not working there on an unpaid basis anymore, but he did for six months.) Another kid worked for a big internet-centric news organization, and the understanding was that if you worked unpaid for 8-9 months, and they liked your work, you would ultimately get a contract as an independent contractor. Meanwhile, he was building a clipping file. He did ultimately get hired by the company where he had interned, but within a couple of months had taken a better job with another company – a job he would not have gotten but for his unpaid experience at the first company.</p>
<p>The Atlantic, by the way, makes extensive use of interns to generate material for The Atlantic Wire. It does pay them, however.</p>
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<p>Their graph makes no sense. Is the data supposed to be continuous or discrete? If continuous why is the horizontal axis bucketed? If discrete why is there a line instead of bars or points or something discrete? And it’s not as if there are just several straight line fragments like one might do naively, the line is curved and appears differentiable at all points except where it starts and ends. It’s completely incomprehensible.</p>
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The student makes the choice. Who says you can’t intern during the day and work during the evening.</p>
<p>And many people do that. But if you need to maximize summer earnings to pay for college, working evenings (in a legal job) is rarely the best way to go. What’s more, as the court case showed, some of the internships are not 9-to-5 jobs (although I think most of the unpaid ones do respect kids’ need to do something else to earn some money). And many employers who hire a lot of part-time and seasonal labor are not interested in workers who have restrictions on which hours they can work.</p>
<p>Actually, I think many unpaid internships offered to students who have not already graduated are set up so that the student receives college credit for the internship. Colleges actively collaborate in that, too. That gets the employers around the wages-and-hours trap that snared the employer in the court case. The “educational” bona fides of the internship are clearly established.</p>
<p>All of this is not to say I think the system is a terrible deal for students. Even in the Atlantic piece, it’s clear that 1 in 6 unpaid interns got a permanent job offer from the internship, and that’s without taking into account how many of the 6 were actually open to a permanent job offer from that organization. I suspect the actual success rate of people who are trying to get a permanent job that way is pretty good, especially if they try more than once.</p>
<p>When you interview if you blow away the interviewer he/she will consider paying you. </p>
<p>So:
<p>How is an unpaid summer internship interferring with potential hiring a full-time equivalent? It’s 2 - 3 months.</p>
<p>It is probably more of a substitution for a paid contractor or temporary employee in the cases where the unpaid internship is in violation of labor laws.</p>
<p>S is a film major (double major with accounting) and landed a PAID internship at a major TV network (development/production). He also had an offer for an UNPAID internship with a small film production company producing a film with caste with star recognition.</p>
<p>He negotiated to reduce the paying internship to 3-days a week and the unpaid internship to 2-days a week so that he could do both. </p>
<p>I wrote this on another thread earlier today. What I failed to point out is that he receives college credit for the internship - plus his university provided him with a stipend to help out with living expenses.</p>
<p>Seems unlikely that this is against the law.</p>
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Ridiculous “graphic summary of data” error for a publication like The Atlantic. I believe someone input points representing the top of what would have been perfectly reasonable bar graphs at discrete GPA intervals and then someone fit curves to those points at the tops of the bar graphs (because the graphing software they were using could do that).</p>
<p>Their analysis of the data seems really flawed.</p>
<p>If unpaid internships are more common in fields and with degrees that normally have a lower unemployment rate out of college compared to the degrees and fields associated with paid internships than this tells us nothing. </p>
<p>Break it down by major. Or compare the employment rate of each relative to the total employment in that field. If less kids with unpaid internships get hired than with hired, but those students have degrees that result in lower employment than the paid internship ones, then its perfectly reasonable.</p>