Paying to work. Sound like a new work-at-home scheme? Think again. This is the norm for thousands of college students take each year in the form of unpaid internships.
According to the career information website Vault, 84 percent of all college students surveyed in 2006 planned to complete at least one internship before graduating. About half of these are unpaid.
At my (unpaid) internship at The (Baltimore) Sun, many of my fellow interns pay more than a thousand dollars to participate in the internship program because they need the credits as part of their major.
At this university, journalism students are required to take JOUR 396/399: Supervised Internship, and many other colleges within the university have similar requirements. Since many students decide to complete internships during the summer, in-state students are paying anywhere from $273-$819 to fulfill this requirement. And that’s just in-state. Out-of-state students are paying anywhere from $902-$2,706 to fulfill this requirement. Add to this the price of gas, and one could easily be out thousands of dollars during the course of the summer.
Sadly, this is the norm rather than an exception. According to Slate Magazine, a student at Bucknell University has to pay anywhere from $286-$1,074 in order to participate in a for-credit summer internship.
Luckily for me, I am not a journalism major. Because of this, I was able to take advantage of the University Career Center’s no-credit internship class UNIV099: Internship Seminar, which allowed me to participate in an academic internship by only paying a $30 application fee. (In the land of internships, I have learned the hard way that “academic” is a fancy euphemism for “non-paying.”)
Internships are a valuable tool for career exploration, and the university should be doing more to encourage its students to participate in them. Sure, the Career Center can help find you an internship, but what about after that? Besides sending you the tuition bill in the mail, you are on your own. But this doesn’t need to be the case.
One solution is to let students receive credit for their summer internships in the fall semester. Since summer tuition costs are calculated by the number of credit hours while in-semester tuition is a set amount, summer internship credits should be counted as part of the fall semester. This would prevent the need for having to dish out more than a thousand dollars for your free labor.
Another possible solution is to give students a financial break for credits earned through internships. Wellesley College in Massachusetts takes this one step further: They issue stipends to students who participate in non-paying summer internships. This would never work here due to the sheer size of the university and the constant need for money due to budget cuts. But what about charging a nominal fee for students who wish to receive credit for their internship? Instead of $273 per credit for in-state students, how about $30 per credit? Better yet, the university should make additional scholarships available in order to help students defray the costs of their internships.
The business world will never change. There are only so many internships available for the large pool of students looking, and corporations and businesses understand this. As long as there are college students willing to work for free in the name of their future, there will be non-paying internships. But our university doesn’t have to make it harder.
Don’t get me wrong; it was my decision to accept my internship and I am enjoying every minute of it. It is just that the university needs to make the experience more accessible to more students. If I had to pay $819 to do it, I would probably be at the pool tonight instead of driving to Baltimore.
We know opportunity costs, but will it pay off? Ask me in five years.
Joel Cohen is a junior government and politics major. He can be reached at jcohendbk@gmail.com.
