Unpaid Internships Aren’t Okay…Here’s Why

If you’re a college student, or related to one, you probably know the dreaded internship hunt well. Most students look high and low trying to find internships related to their fields that can fill a resume slot ~and~ support them for a summer. Unfortunately, paying internships are few and far between. That puts a lot of students in an unwinnable situation: either you set yourself back on your resume in comparison with your peers by finding a paying job, or you have to find some way to support yourself while putting in countless hours of unpaid work per week.

Up until this year, I had pretty much hit the jackpot. Two summers ago I found a job with UW’s SOAR orientation program; it wasn’t exactly in my field (“my field” is loosely defined right now, what can I say) but it was well-paid and allowed me to foster some great relationships with UW staff members. I was even able to work a few hours a week during the school year for some extra pocket change. Flash forward to this year, and I’m finishing up my requirements and getting through the course work for my certificate in Criminal Justice. As I scrolled through the requirements, I see that all students are required to complete an internship in order to receive the certificate. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, especially considering the program helps place you with a local internship program. Although, it’s worth mentioning that 90% of the internships affiliated with the program are unpaid. The more I thought about the requirement, the more frustrated I became; it left me wondering what happens to students who can’t afford to spend a semester doing an unpaid internship, especially during the pandemic. I’m lucky that I’m in a position where I can put in 15 hours of unpaid work at a local organization and be okay. Not everyone can say the same.

While my experience was with the Criminal Justice Program, the same is true for plenty of other fields. Most business students, for example, need to work summer internships that often offer little to no compensation. Many students looking to get experience in media production also do unpaid work to get their feet off the ground. Requiring students to put in hours of unpaid work for an internship, whether part time during the school year or full time during the summer, is privileged and unfair. So many students work day and night to keep themselves financially afloat and make sure their tuition is paid. Say they make it through college working as many hours as they can at a restaurant, and it’s now time to enter the work force or apply to post graduate programs. Those students, the ones who worked as hard as they could to simply get through school are now most likely behind their peers. They won’t have the sort of “relevant” information a lot of companies and organizations will be looking for. A student without 15-30 hours a week to give freely should not be penalized, and students who do want to put those hours in should be compensated. 

This all honestly leaves me wondering where we got the idea that it was totally normal to rack up hours and hours of uncompensated work just to fill out a slot on a resume. I know that some organizations rely on college students to do work they can’t afford to give to their employees, but to me those fall into two groups: organizations that can rebrand unpaid internships as volunteer work and still attract people, and companies who need to find a way to pay people for the work they do. At the end of the day, unpaid internships create an opportunity gap that benefits students who come from privileged backgrounds, students who can afford to not make money for months at a time. If we accept unpaid internships as a given, we do a disservice to students who are paying their own way through school and forging their own path. The work that all students do is valuable, and it’s time they started getting paid for it. 

• business
• internships
• resume
• work