My daughter is entering her senior year in college (SUNY @ Purchase) and is trying to figure out how she can come up with a career path that will pay her way and also be enjoyable.
Of course I wish that she would have started this process about six years earlier; not that she should have decided what she 'wanted to be when she grew up,' but that she might have considered doing some of the prep work necessary for doing well on things like standardized tests...(oh well, no use crying over spilled milk).
One of her possible areas of interest is Sports Management, and she is thinking about applying for an internship with the East Coast Athletic Conference (ECAC) for the academic year starting in September. Since she is on one of her school's athletic teams, she is eligible for consideration. She may have some tough competition for the position, however, as she is majoring in something rather unrelated and will have taken a total of zero business classes as an undergraduate. She may be able to get picked, though, as she can be charming when she wants to be, has been relatively successful in past interview situations, and can push her economics minor as having relevance to their needs.
The ECAC internship pays a total of $1575 a month or about $14,000 for the year. It does provide health insurance, which will still probably be a need for her next year regardless of what legislation gets passed this fall. The truly sad thing about the situation is not the abysmally low pay (only about 30% above the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour), but the fact that it's considered a great salary for an internship. Apparently, these days, most internships don't pay anything at all.
It would be bad enough, to one way of thinking, if these unpaid internships were with nonprofit or governmental institutions. One can view these situations as a way for new graduates to give back to society while simultaneously upgrading their skills and making connections / networking. It would be preferential for those agencies to pay their interns a low but living wage so that these situations are not only open to those rich enough to afford going a year without a salary (or foolish enough to climb themselves onto a mountain of debt before their true job prospects become clear), but the tax-cutting mania of the last three decades has starved most of these organizations out of their ability to support any paid staff beyond a skeleton crew. The true outrage can be found in the plethora of profitable corporations that take on unpaid interns.
According to Business Week,"[S]ports and media...[m]arketing, public relations, and other types of firms, especially small ones" are all out there exploiting the fringes of the job market in this way. There's really no question as to why they do this - it's because they can. So many new entrants to the job market want to have internships on their resume that they're willing to do them gratis. Why should they pay a decent wage for these services when they can 'get their milk for free?'
Or can they?
We have laws in this country designed to protect the economically vulnerable from this kind of predation. Chief amongst them are our minimum wage laws. Currently it is against the law in almost all circumstances to employ workers without paying at least $7.25 per hour (more in some states). The only way that these internship providers get away with stiffing their interns is that they offer 'college credit' in exchange for the work done. However, this often does not reduce the actual tuition which their interns may wind up having to pay, as there are limits imposed by colleges on how many credits may be granted for work done outside the college. Even when tuition costs are reduced, the cost reduction is not close to what would have been earned at minimum wage levels.
The additional travesty is that some of these unpaid internships are being offered by for-profit organizations that characterize themselves as 'progressive.' For example, I recently saw a posting for an unpaid internship with Progressive Strategies LLC, a self-styled 'progressive political consulting firm' who, rather than offer wages, say 'we do take you to fantastic lunches frequently and can offer course credit.' This self-serving hypocrisy tops my day's list of aggravations, even exceeding my contempt for those in Congress that call themselves Democrats yet oppose real health care reform!