Since 1992, the percentage of graduating college students who participated in internships during their schooling has risen from 9% to 83%, now running at 2.5 million students each year. These have benefits for both employer and student, including networking and vetting for future employment. On the student end, not just benefits, but, increasingly, a requirement. The National Association of Colleges and Employers reported in its 2008 Experiential Education Survey that "76% of firms reported relevant work experience in the form of internships as the primary decision to hire a new college graduate," according to the Economic Policy Institute.
In short, employers have come to expect new graduates to have relevant work experience and the skills and proficiencies that internships can provide. In other words, internships have become vital to career success.
All well and good except that, as EPI points out in a recent policy memorandum, internships "are only loosely regulated through vague and outdated employment law" and "these regulations go essentially unenforced." This inadequate regulation and enforcement:
• Leaves the majority of interns unprotected by workplace discrimination and harassment statues such as the Civil Rights Act, Americans with Disability Act, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act;
• Fosters the growth of unpaid internships, which in turn limits participation to only the students who can afford to forego wages and pay for living expenses, effectively institutionalizing socioeconomic disparities; and
• Permits (and even incentivizes) the replacement of regular workers with unpaid college students and recent graduates.
Fixing this, EPI memorandum writers Kathryn Anne Edwards and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez say, means, among other things, reforming the 72-year-old Fair Labor Standards Act so that a student will not be discouraged from reporting employers who abuse internships. Not much incentive to do that when another student will readily work for free. Reforms, they say, should include new legislation extending coverage of relevant workplace laws, such as the Equal Pay Act, Civil Rights Act, Age Discrimination Act, and the Americans with Disability Act, to interns "by changing the definition of an 'employee' to include interns who perform work for an employer." Congress should also create a "system of financial supports for low-income students who pursue public service internships in government agencies or non-profit organizations."
The latter would be a good fit with other existing and proposed service-oriented operations - such as the National Health Service Corps. - that provide tuition, fees and educational loan forgiveness to students and graduates who work in underserved or low-income areas of the country. Such proposals are extensions of the New Deal attitude and approach so abhorred by the right wing. They would, therefore, run into immediate opposition among Republicans and those Democrats who ride their party's coattails without a firm understanding of what they should be doing in exchange. That opposition shouldn't become an excuse for doing nothing.