At my school, in my major, we are required to do six 150-hour unpaid internships. Each internship costs about 2,300 bucks. That means that my parents are paying my school close to $14,000 so that I can provide 900 hours of free labor to somebody else.
Is this ethical?
Are you getting class credit for the internship (which is what what my students got)?
Internships are not just about what you’re giving to someone else, but are also about what you’re getting from them (tangible skills, industry contacts, credits toward graduation etc).
Yes, but even then, no energy is expended by the school (i.e. no teaching) except in the form of reading and grading our journals.
Having run internships before, I can tell you it was a lot of work for me and depending on how it’s organized, could be for your profs as well.
I had to:
Secure contacts and sites for internships
Do site visits to meet with managers
Read and grade logs, reports etc
Create surveys and evaluate outcomes for employers to assess internship effectiveness
Have periodic individual meetings with students to see how the internship is progressing
Some years my internship courses were a hell of a lot more work than my regular classes.
Even if you have a University internship office, someone is doing all that leg work to make sure those opportunities are available, sites are being monitored, that liability insurance is being paid in case you get hurt or cause damage on site etc.
Not sure why you don’t think reading and grading journals is not teaching or work.
I have never heard of paying to do an internship. Has the school outlined what the costs are for? And more importantly, do they waive the fee or provide assistance for students who cannot afford to spend that much to do an internship? Students have enough trouble with making ends meet when they do unpaid internships. I would imagine it would be a hardship for many to pay that amount of money.
Some places internships are classes and you credit toward graduation like any other class. Financial aid would apply. Don’t know about the OP.
This is what I was assuming (or what I am familiar with). Students have a class that is effectively an internship with some review / supervision by faculty. You get units for it, and you have to pay for units.
What type of internships are we talking about? Do you go to an outside company or other organization and do profit generating work for them? No, I would never do that as an unpaid internship let alone pay for it. I don’t believe in unpaid but free internships in such circumstances.
Or, is it more like a research or teaching internship where you get a mentor and learn specific parts of your chosen field more in depth? That may or may not be so bad. That is basically the model of most academic graduate school although most students get paid to do that rather than pay for those at least at the PhD candidate level.
As a general rule, it sounds shady but I am prepared to change my mind for some limited, specific circumstances.
I don’t know what you mean by shady, but I’ve placed students in paid and unpaid internships. Everything from industrial biotech positions to academic labs, both paid and unpaid. They were fantastic experiences. Many ended up being their first jobs after graduation.
The students, in my case, were getting class credit. That’s not nothing. Most places I know students are fighting to get into good internships. Many are highly competitive.
I think shady is really not an appropriate word, unless something truly egregious is going on.
Yep :nodding: This is how it was done at my university.
How gratifying to see an academic finally acknowledge (at least by implication) that most university coursework is jackshit useless, that one can learn a lot more relevant information on the job, and that most universities function as little more than exorbitantly expensive employer introduction services.
Social Work major, early 1990’s, public university. We spent our last semester doing a 36 hour-a-week practicum at a social service agency. (There was also a 4 hour weekly lecture.) The social service agency got a free almost-full time employee; in exchange they had to pay for/provide any additional certification required for employees at their agency, and they were not allowed to use us for clerical/maintenance/personal assistance stuff. The university, meanwhile, had our backs in case of disputes, plus there was the weekly lecture and journal grading.
We paid the standard full-time course hours rate–basically what 12 or 15 semester hours would be–and we used to joke that we were paying the school to whore us out, but the reality of it was that we were paying for the class credit and experience. So, in that case, yes, I do think it was ethical. (Businesses that call unpaid, non-student slaves “interns”–not ethical, but that’s a rant for another time.)
Um, I didn’t say that. What an odd interpretation.
My students weren’t prepared to do their internships until they had huge amount of coursework under their belts. They would have been at best clueless and not able to benefit and at worst dangerous.
These experiences are complementary.
Is the amount you are paying above and beyond regular tuition fees? When I did my internships in college I was taking a full course load and paid the “full time student” tuition (not per unit, like part-timers). I did not pay anything extra for my internship. I was also not paid for the work I did, other than in course credits.
Sounds like my student teaching, though as an undergrad it was only one day a week in a middle school (I also was expected to volunteer in another school at the same time, so I chose an early literacy program at a local elementary school). It never occurred to me until now that paying for the credits for the classroom part could be considered paying for the experience.
It’s only unethical if you had no way of knowing about it when you started your studies. If you knew, or could have known if you’d read the information, then no, it’s not unethical, it’s part of the package.
I don’t know about ethics, but this is one area where I’m continually astonished about the difference between technical and non-technical internships. Where I work (software), interns are paid the equivalent of $60-70k equivalent annual salary. My sister, in broadcasting, got paid a big fat nothing (I guess she’s lucky she didn’t have to pay them). Supply and demand, I guess.
I know of paid internships, but they’re generally 10-20 hours a week at $10 or so an hour and the differences are that the intern is learning and doing more interesting work than a typical $10/hr job. How is an internship that pays the equivalent of $60-70K different from a job paying the same?
I had to do an “internship” in grad school, and used the full-time job I was currently working to fulfill the requirement, which as pretty ridiculous. Basically, I ended up handing over a couple of those paychecks directly to the school.
I was required to meet once with my advisor to discuss how it was going, and do a ten page writeup on some aspect of the work.
I had a software development internship in college that was legally characterized as full-time employment (I got a W-2) for which there was no specific college credit awarded (though it gave valuable experience that could help in senior level classes and grad school, ymmv). It paid fast-food burger flipper wages, but it let me run a little bit with bigshots who made 70k-150k. Good times. The internship was optional, btw, and I got to keep the money and didn’t have to account back to the school on anything that happened, let alone write a paper on it.