Paying for the privilege of working

[Vladenschlutte]

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I compare that to a letter my younger kid received today from Drexel promising upto $16,000 per coop experience at Drexel.

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<p>I like the “upto” qualifier. $0 is in that range. I know there’s a few companies out there that pay in that area for internships, but could hardly imagine Drexel even coming close to saying its student could even expect to get something like that. </p>

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What bothers me are the unpaid summer internships that require students to enroll for summer school units costing perhaps a couple of thousand dollars.

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<p>I don’t think it’s the internship requiring it be for credit. Why would the company care if the kid pays the college or not? It’s the college requiring an unpaid internship that both happens, and is bad.</p>

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I wonder if the libertarians looking at it from an economics point of view see this phenomenon as just an indication that the market clearing pay level for whatever type of entry level jobs these are has fallen to negative (i.e. not just fallen to zero for unpaid internships, but negative in that the employee has to pay to get the job).

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<p>If they want credit for it, I think the idea is that the value the unpaid internship provides + the value of that portion of a degree and all employment benefits conferred by that degree is equal to tuition + the value of labor used on the internship.</p>