Hundreds of program providers have seized on a growing interest in interning abroad, and have added numerous bells and whistles at a steep cost to students.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/education/edlife/the-10000-unpaid-global-internship.html
That doesn’t even make any sense. The example given in the article cost $16,000; that’s about the cost of a study abroad program for a semester (it of course depends on the program and what it includes). One of the summer internships is nearly $10,000, which is about the same as the all-inclusive cost (tuition, room, and board) for a 6-8 week summer study abroad through SIT. 8 weeks with CIEE or IES is cheaper. If students can’t afford study abroad they can’t afford an internship abroad, either.
They’re not working for free; they are paying to work. The idea of an unpaid internship in and of itself was silly to me in college because even if I wasn’t fully qualified for the job, I am still performing some kind of labor, so I should get paid (aside from the fact that I absolutely could not afford to do an unpaid internship. I needed to feed and house myself over the summers). But paying for the privilege of working for someone? How many of these kids get to actually go to work for Wimbledon? If you have the cash to pay $10,000 for a summer internship you could just take a trip to Wimbledon.
I studied abroad, but I had to do it during the academic year when I could use my financial aid to pay for it.
If a student finds that only unpaid internships are available in the line of work of interest, that should be a warning that entry-level jobs in that line of work will be difficult to get. If the unpaid internship experience is necessary or helpful in getting paid entry-level jobs in that line of work, that may be a signal that entering that line of work is only accessible to those who have parental financial support for the unpaid internships.
Student encountering this situation may want to re-evaluate their professional goals.
^^except that one of the largest ‘employers’ of unpaid internships is the US federal government! Even post-grad, the government offers a lot of opportunities to work. Unpaid.
I remember reading a hilarious article a few years back about federal and state governments hiring lawyers to work as prosecutors for free. That’s right, the prosecutor handling your murder case, your robbery case, your drug case might be rushing to get out of there because he doesn’t want to be late for his shift at Burger King because that’s what’s paying the bills. I’m having trouble imagining the committee meeting where someone proposed this and it pretty much had to have happened at a bar (up to the gills in tequila) or around a bong or something. I realize that it’s probably necessary for budgeting reasons, but I wonder what’s next?
The whole idea of unpaid internships is so silly to me. Unless your family can support you all the way, I’d probably stay away from any job where those things are the norm.
The industry is probably rigged up so that people who don’t have these unpaid internship experiences have little to no chance of getting a job there. The internship doesn’t guarantee you a job, but it makes you competitive for one.
Many (manymanymany) of the first year attorneys ‘working’ for the justice department as Assistant US Attorneys are unpaid. These are positions that should pay about $75000 plus locality adjustment, government benefits, time earned toward pension, etc. It’s ridiculous that the government gets away with it.
Not sure why you wrote “except”. Such government unpaid internships are a signal that those lines of work are highly competitive to get into (just like in lines of work at private employers what unpaid internships are the norm). As with any line of work where unpaid internships are the norm for entry level persons, someone considering those lines of work should be aware of the difficulty of getting an entry level paid job in those lines of work, and perhaps reconsider his/her career direction if s/he cannot afford to do the prerequisite unpaid internships.
As we’ve discussed on this forum before, “worth” is relative. Paying $10,000 for an international internship doesn’t seem that absurd considering that there are plenty of people paying $60,000 – A YEAR! – for an undergraduate degree. Neither is necessary to get a job (even a good job), yet both options exist and will continue to exist as long as there are people out there who perceive them to be worthwhile investments, in real or intangible terms.
What bothers me about this though – and I could be way off base here – is that it doesn’t sound like some of these unpaid internships are purely educational. It sounds like they often do work for the company that the company would otherwise hire a paid worker to do. With a college degree, it’s explicitly a fee-for-service model where you pay X amount for tuition, room, and board and if you pass your classes there’s a degree at the end.
With these unpaid internships, you’re paying for the opportunity to work and presumably learn about the industry, and you’re also effectively donating to the organization the fair market value of whatever work you’re doing. If the purpose was purely educational I wouldn’t see anything sleazy about it, but it sounds like at least some of the time the interns are displacing paid workers.
(I realize that the interns themselves do get a lot of value out of these experiences regardless though.)
Internships are great while in Graduate School.
I do not how much they actually are allowed to do before reaching this level. And they have to be baby-sitted (looked over).
But say at Med. School (Law School, other Grad.), medical students can actually provide a real help and they do, while getting very rich training themselves and being greatly appreciated by those who they help as well as their superiors. And this trips are expensive, but usually are selective as more want to participate than spot available.
Medical residents are paid. So are PhD students who work as teaching assistants or research assistants. Not really analogous to unpaid interns (JD graduates who cannot get law jobs may be more analogous).
I was not talking about Medical residents, I was talking about medical students in my post #9, I said explicitly “medical students”, and they are NOT getting paid, they pay for these very expensive trips where they work very hard and where they are subjected to harsh conditions. But they are coming back very happy and satisfied.