The Pay Is the Thing

Robert F. Kennedy ’48 famously asked America “What is the price tag on equal justice under law?”  America might want to answer that there shouldn’t be a price tag on the fairness sought in employment practices.  If so, it’s clear that the current trend in internships perpetuates inequality and must be stopped.  To best remedy this, the United States should eliminate unpaid internships, except for those at non-profits.

We advocate the restriction of unpaid internships because of the structural inequality inherent to acquiring these internships.  Since richer students have the means to forgo wages, socioeconomic class determines, in large part, one’s ability to procure an internship.  This unfair economic stratification means that poorer students and graduates often cannot afford to accept unpaid positions.

Worse, these same students later face de facto discrimination when applying for jobs for which an internship is deemed a stepping-stone.  The majority of firms expressly cited “relevant work experience in the form of internships” as the primary motivation to hire a recent college graduate.  As it stands, if you can’t afford work to without pay before graduating, you might not work at all afterwards.

Additionally, students’ unofficial understanding of the value of an internship skews their perspective on the conditions under which their work is important.  Those who perform menial tasks under the auspices of an internship often receive greater prestige than those who perform the same tasks for pay.  This magnification of an internship experience fails to give equal credit to those who do the same labor but need financial compensation for their work.

To make the transition away from such internships easier, federal funding should subsidize otherwise unpaid positions at non-profits. These organizations often cannot afford to provide their interns with wages, unlike their for-profit counterparts.  This funding would allow students of all backgrounds to consider opportunities outside of the profit sector, and most importantly, ensure that high net worth is not a prerequisite for considering public service as a career option.

While these reforms might result in fewer internship opportunities, this cost is worth the elimination of discrimination—specifically against those who cannot afford the opportunity cost of these internships, namely, working without wages. Employers should continue to value experience, but make it clear to students that it is no longer necessary to hold an internship to get hired.

An attitudinal shift among employers must go hand in hand with changed student focus.  Undergraduates should shift their approach toward other ways to learn skills, such as working for non-profits or volunteering. Additionally, meaningful work can be found in jobs that don’t offer fantastic compensation above minimum wage or the prestige of an internship.

It is also important to keep in mind that the number of opportunities for internships might not decrease as much as would be presumed.  Since unpaid interns still require resources from companies, the resources previously used for unpaid internships could be turned into wages. Moreover, companies will likely hire additional individuals to complete any work that is absolutely necessary.  Finally, those fields that traditionally require job applicants to have completed internships, like journalism, would have to pay students to work for them.  This prediction isn’t speculation—within less than a week of the Times article’s publication investigating the legality of internships, one media outlet discovered apparently previously unavailable resources to compensate all of their interns.

Crucially, this corrective would make employment practices more equitable.  After this change, the significance of a students’ employment history would no longer correlate with the significance of their finances, but instead result from a process of an open contest among all socioeconomic classes. Society can and should remove structural and economic barriers to employment, and firms will have no choice but to survive the increased demand on their resources. If the U.S. eliminates such obstacles, it will move one step closer to making RFK’s question a relic of the past.