Ending Unpaid Internships
Colleges are creating new funds and programs to pay students for work when
employers won’t. It’s one way to equalize internship opportunities, which have
historically excluded low-income students.
By
Maria Carrasco
April 12, 2022
ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES PLUS
Data show that students of color are less likely to have any internships, paid or unpaid.
Internships tend to advantage students who are already advantaged—
essentially those who can afford to work for cheap or free.
According to data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers
2021 Student Survey, 74 percent of white students said they’d had unpaid
internships and 73 percent had paid internships, compared to 8 percent and
6.6 percent, respectively, for Black students and 10.2 percent and 7 percent
for Hispanic or Latinx students. Among first-generation students, 25.6 percent
reported they were unpaid interns and 20.5 percent were paid.
And paid internships tend to pay off, making it more likely for students to land
a job after college. According to NACE, students who’d worked as paid interns
received an average of 1.12 job offers in 2021, while unpaid interns got an
average of 0.85 and those with no internship experience received 0.64 job
offers.
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No wonder many institutions are working to end unpaid internships.
“I’ve been seeing a lot of interest outside of career center offices and
internship coordinators to make sure that most internships, if not all of them,
are paid,” said Matthew Hora, co-director of the Center for Research on
College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “I
think it’s been a long-standing concern.”
Initially community colleges led the fight against unpaid internships, since
those institutions already had more lower-income students, but in recent
years more R-1 institutions have joined in, said Hora.
“Especially if there’s relocation costs, like to D.C., Chicago or New York, an
unpaid internship basically is out of reach for most college students,” Hora
said. “What that means is you’re imposing a gatekeeping mechanism on
entering into these experiences and making them unpaid and out of reach to
possibly the majority of college students. I think they’re definitely unfair,
exclusionary and undemocratic.”
Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at
Georgetown University, agrees internships are inherently for privileged
students, especially since higher education eliminated vocational
studies from curriculums in the 1980s. Now there’s an expectation that since
students pay the university to take an English course, they shouldn’t also pay
to have an internship, he said.
“One of the basic problems all the colleges face is internships and other
forms of work-based learning outside the college curriculum tend to involve
employers and employers who have never participated actively in American
education,” Carnevale said. “Employers refuse to take responsibility for
training or educating people, but they want trained and educated people to
come to work.”
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Now some institutions are taking the matter into their own hands. At the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, a $30,000 gift from one donor in 2006 to
fund a small group of unpaid student internships has blossomed into a major
fundraising operation that raises $130,000 a year and has a department with a
staff of 15, said Kathleen Rause, internship coordinator.
“We began to realize the very increased need for those internship funds,”
Rause said. “And so our executive director, along with our foundation and our
dean, decided to prioritize internship funding as something that we wanted to
actively solicit funds for.”
Madison alumni bankroll the SuccessWorks at the College of Letters &
Science Internship Fund, which awards up to $5,000 for undergraduates
seeking to take advantage of an internship, either paid or unpaid. The funds
may be used to offset lack of wages or assist with internship expenses, such
as room and board and transportation costs.
Rause said since the program launched in 2018, about 100 students have
applied each year. She said the biggest determinant for selecting recipients is
demonstrated financial need, followed by whether the student has been
historically underrepresented in their major or industry and how much of a
“good learning experience” it is.
“To hear that someone’s been able to take advantage of an internship
because of this money—that’s our goal and that’s the success measure we’re
looking for,” said Rause.
She hopes the SuccessWorks fund is able to expand to address more
students’ needs, particularly among those who don’t even know it exists.
“I think that providing opportunity is our biggest goal and providing access for
students that have historically not had it,” Rause said. “We are happy to
expand all the way until we’re able to fund every student who applies with
financial need, and that, of course, is a function of the funding that we have
available.”
Similarly, the New College of Florida created the Sarasota-Manatee Arts &
Humanities Internship Program, which started in 2020 and is a for-credit
program that allows students to apply for several internships in the region, in
fields like education, youth development, fine art, theater, community outreach
and video production. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, the program pays the interns a minimum-wage salary as well as a
stipend to the internship provider to cover administrative costs, which
run about $1,600 per student.
Dwayne Peterson, executive director of career education at the New College
of Florida, said during a panel on unpaid internships Thursday that his college
has been able to fund about 60 internships over the last two years. Beyond
just helping students make connections, the program allowed them to work
for pay in arts and humanities fields, which are far more likely to seek unpaid
interns than business and engineering employers.
“A lot of time students were aware that in arts- and humanities-related work,
there weren’t a lot of paid internships, so this has helped them with that
perception of that,” Peterson said during the panel. “There could be paid
experiences that align with the types of interests they have.”
The University of Baltimore’s Job Location and Development program funded
by the U.S. Department of Education has grown significantly, said Lana Farley,
assistant director of employer relations. The program works with students
eligible for Federal Work-Study, as determined by their financial situation, to
create off-campus job opportunities, including internships and projects.
Employers bear no compensation responsibility, since the funds come
through the Federal Work-Study program.
Currently the program has 15 students, with opportunities to intern at the
Baltimore mayor’s Office of Human Services and other nonprofits, Farley said.
The program gives students with financial need a path to finding an
internship.
“I just go to my Federal Work-Study roster and type the student’s name in and
if they’re on that list, it’s just awesome, because then I’m able to say, ‘Hey,
listen, you know, you are actually able to do an internship, which is guaranteed
payment because it’s through this particular program,’” Farley said. “So it’s
really helped alleviate students in the sense of being able to have one less
thing to worry about.”
Combining internships with Federal Work-Study funds could help
more students get internships, Carnevale said. Instead of students cleaning
dishes at the university’s cafeteria, they could be getting paid with federal
funds to intern somewhere relevant to their area of study.
“Truthfully, that is the precedent here that matters—we do have Federal WorkStudy programs and we need to expand them,” Carnevale said. “There are
other versions of this, right? There’s not just work-study, but there’s the sort of
apprenticeship models. And when you talk to employers, they’ll tell you, they
want nothing to do with that stuff.”
Hora said he thinks the dissatisfaction with unpaid internships will only
increase in the future, but that they won’t disappear unless institutions engage
in partnerships with employers and the government to pay students for their
work.
“I think part of the problem is just the numbers—whether they’re paid or
unpaid, there’s not that many internships out there,” Hora said. “So it’s a dual
problem of higher ed creating more internships and then, as they do that, they
need to make sure that they’re paid.”