dagblog - Comments for "Unpaid Internships and the College Racket"

As Orion suggests, I think

Verified Atheist — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 20:30:27 +0000

In reply to I wonder how much real work

As Orion suggests, I think that the software industry is the exception rather than the rule. The one thing that is probably not the exception is that most interns (whether paid or unpaid) take a while before they're able to contribute productively, unless the company using them is willing to spend a large amount of time (and hence money) training them in the beginning. The non-profit school where my wife used to work used unpaid interns and even unpaid it was a challenge balancing the expense required to train them versus the value they added. That said, after training them, the good ones would be recruited to work there after graduating, in which case the cost of their training was definitely worth it.

I can really understand your

Orion — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 19:01:48 +0000

In reply to I wonder how much real work

I can really understand your points but I recommend reading the Vice article I cited. The individual seemed to have a comparable workload between his political internship and working as a caterer. The catering work was valued much more monetarily than his internship, however, and the reasons you noted probably play in to why that is.

I wonder how much real work

Michael Wolraich — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 20:54:57 +0000

In reply to Unpaid Internships and the College Racket

I wonder how much real work interns do. I can only speak for the software industry where interns are almost always paid but generally useless. Young employees require a lot of training before they become productive, and since internships are short-term, there's no incentive for businesses to invest in training them.

Consequently, I've always thought of internships as cynical deals between companies and college kids. Businesses uses internships as a recruiting tool. College kids use them to pad their resumes.

So I don't worry to much about kids working for free. If it's money the kids want, they can take low-skill jobs summer where they can be productive from the get-go. What bothers me is that only rich kids can afford to do internships and thereby pad their resumes in a way that poorer kids who spend their summers earning money cannot.