I don’t know how long ago you were in college, but the job market isn’t necessarily the same as it was then. I don’t think that can be all blamed on internships.
FWIW, I just saw this list come up. $7k/mo for the top slot. I think interns are typically limited to 40 hrs/week, which would translate to ~$40/hr. I work for a company on that list, though we aren’t on the top slot.
Unpaid, dead end internships are an effect of a terrible job market, not the cause.
And why are so many people willing to do these jobs for free? A lot of these jobs sound like bullshit to begin with. Does fetching coffee for some studio exec or marketing VP ever lead to a real job in those fields?
Most of my experience with interns have been at technology or management consulting firms. They are typically paid well and many of them end up being hired by the company.
We still work them pretty hard, but then again, everyone tends to work hard at those places.
I think that in your years of working, you probably have accumulated skills that make your more valuable than the average 20 year old.
The job market might have changed since you got your entry level job.
According to an article (PDF) in the New Yorker, employers are less willing to train new workers than they were before the economy tanked. They’re less willing to train because they know people are more desperate.
The unpaid internship sucks, but it’s a reality at this point. Confounding the problem is that the shift in hiring practices was a surprise to the most recent flux of graduates. They graduated after being taught by colleges about the old economy, where employers were willing to train. Had they known the reality, I suspect they would have been more prepared, and would have acquired more experience while in college. Without being prepared, they’ve graduated college after too much time, debt, and effort to go back and do things differently.
Employers basically sandbagged graduates who were unprepared for the new reality and could not go back and change what they did in college. Hopefully, colleges and graduates will learn to adjust going forward.
Public libraries, hospitals, etc. often do have large volunteer corps BUT they don’t fool the volunteers into thinking that it’s going to lead a job AND they are (usually) nonprofit entities.
Interesting choice of words in the thread title. interns should suck it.
Isn’t that what Bill Clinton said to Monica?
No, internships can be blamed on the job market. If nearly everyone from good schools can find work, companies won’t be able to get anyone decent to work for free. That’s how it is in engineering.
But unpaid internships certainly do hurt the job market to some small extent, unless you truly believe interns only do stuff that the company wouldn’t bother with without them.
This isn’t just true for interns. Employers in the IT industry want people who know the latest tools so they can start without training. Many want colleges to turn into trade schools and train kids on what is hot right now. In five years you can get rid of them and hire a new batch.
When applied to interns, all we need to do is enforce the law. Internships during summers at college make sense - even if unpaid, though paid is better - free internships for graduates don’t.
My daughter found that to get a permanent job in Germany she had to do an internship, even though her Masters was from a German university. But it was paid. And paid reasonably well.
Employers care about saving money and hiring people who can get the job done. One of the ways companies have been cutting cost is by reducing training. Good companies still provide training for their employees because they know it’s a good investment.
I’m not sure what you are talking about with a “change in hiring practices”. Honestly, we were told 20 years ago that we should be looking for practical work experience during our summer vacations instead of working as lifeguards or in fast food. When companies hire, they look for that sort of work experience as well as examples of leadership and teamwork.
Heck, I’ve been telling people on this board for years that you should spend at least some amount of college time taking courses in business, accounting, computers, and other practical skills, only to be told that college is not for “vocational” training. Well, have fun having no vocation.
Let’s not pretend that companies are acting in the name of some universally respected and neutral good here. Since the 1960s, American companies have been increasingly profitable, but the balance of the benefit has radically shifted in that top managers and executives have been “saving money” in order to pad their own personal compensation in increasingly disproportionate levels.
There’s no rational basis for assuming that this is either good for the company or good in general.
I had two back-to-back internships lasting at least six months in total, both unpaid. It’s really hard working full time and not getting paid. 
Kind of demoralizing, even in an area of interest, because it’s hard to focus when all you can think about is how your bank account is dwindling down and how your supervisor gets a tax break for the free labor but you can’t even get a buck an hour to cover the gas for the drive everyday. Most of us were also taking required evening classes at the same time so it was impossible to find any work, save for the weekend. I wasn’t fond of a six day week where I got $60 to try to live off of from one day’s pay, most of it going to gas. It sucked.
Did you end up getting a job in your field of interest?
One of the worst things about internships for school is that you also have to pay for the credits. My required grad school “internship” was my full time job, and I had the pleasure of handing over two of my paychecks in order to graduate.
Student teaching is like this, except it’s unpaid + you have to pay for the credits. One of the ironies is that because it’s unpaid, a lot of people have to work a second job while student teaching. This significantly detracts from the experience, because like many things, you get out of it what you put into it. I learned a ton during my student teaching, but much of that is because I was putting 60 hours a week into it. If I had had a second job, I would have had to limit myself to barely meeting expectations, and I wouldn’t have learned nearly as much. I then wouldn’t have made as good an impression at my first round of interviews, and likely wouldn’t have been as effective in those first years of my career–which would have meant I didn’t have some early opportunities that really paid off.
Perhaps we’re regressing to the paid apprenticeships of yore?
My college major necessitates a fair amount of unpaid internships. I haven’t done any yet, but I’ve been building my mind up to the fact that they’re inevitably coming down the pipe. Call me insecure, but I just have a big problem with having to work for free.
For the life of me I can’t understand how unpaid internships are even legal, but nobody in the legal system seems to have an issue with them. As far as I can tell, they’re effectively forms of 21st century slavery.
Well, no, because the “paid apprenticeships of yore” were, ya know, PAID.
Umm… they were paid for by the parents of the apprentice, not the master.
That’s not insecurity, that’s self-respect.