Paying for college internships should be banned

Paying for college internships is wrong on many levels. They should be banned or made illegal.  What do you think? Please comment below.

Public radio station WBUR in Boston aired a provocative program Paying to work for Free yesterday that focused mostly on a company called University of Dreams which charges $6,000-$9,000 per internship. It's web site shows the freshly-scrubbed and smiling faces of its paying customers. I normally get both sides of the story, but I do not need to touch base with these firms after listening to Lev Bayer, CEO of the Washington Internship Program (WIP), defend his indefensible program.

By the way, WIP publishes a list of its clients and charges $3,400 in "tuition" which does not include housing. University of Dreams also publishes a sampling of companies with which it does business.

With the exception of Bayer, the show's guests and most of the callers said paying for internships was  questionable or condemned them outright.  Lawrence Mishal of the Economic Policy Institute said paying for internships was "illegal" given minimum wage laws in the private sector. Show host Tom Ashbrook's questions and incredulity strongly suggested he thought they were wrong.

New York Times paid intern Gerry Shih who wrote a story on the subject said he was "uncomfortable" with them, but didn't seem to reject the idea completely given their popularity. Some of the guests talked about the necessity of internships in getting a job, but less than a fifth of all college grads have them.

One caller claiming to a high tech employer, said he would refuse to hire anyone who has paid for an internship. Bravo!  Comments to the show run strong against the idea.

There's also the issue of unpaid internships or ones for college credit in which the school charges normal tuition. Those are questionable too, but at least the student gets free experience and/or college credit out of them. In the mid-seventies, I did a paid internship at a local newspaper for college credit that I found myself. The school's involvement was the department head spending a half hour reading my book of clips and grading it (got an A). I was charged for the course. It beat sitting in a classroom.

My daughter, a college junior in communications, did an unpaid internship this summer and had a good experience. We understood the small PR firm she worked was affected by the recession so she was grateful for the opportunity.  She pursued and got the internship on her own after I gave her the lead. Interviewing is invaluable experience in and of itself.

My son interned one summer on the magazine where I was editor-in-chief although he worked on the sales side.  He was well-paid and my company at the time took the position unpaid internships or summer help - whatever you want to call it - was illegal.

He will be a college senior this year in the nation's capitol. Using grit and smarts, he has been enormously successful finding paid and unpaid jobs in his field of politics and international relations going back to his junior year in high school. He has taken initiative and is not afraid to pick up the phone.

I've used paid interns on several occasions. Sometimes they were busy and engaged. Other times they were running the copy machine, kibbitzing on Facebook, reading the newspaper or sleeping off a hangover. The work tends to be uneven, but the truth is, they look good on the resume.

Here's a laundry list of the things that bother me about paying for internships:

--First and foremost, they favor the elite with the money to pay for them. I suppose that's no different than wealthy and influential families getting their spawn into Harvard or Yale, but college admissions has become a more level playing field over the years. Internships seem to be going in exactly the opposite direction of modern day college admissions.

-- Companies that accept this free help while enriching a middleman should be ashamed. Companies big and small should initiate there own intern programs based solely on merit and relationships with colleges which educate the individuals they need. Internships should be an integral function of the human resources department. If a company can't find good interns, I wonder how they stay in business.

-- Whatever happened to individual initiative? Whatever happened to the kid who banged on doors and used his or her dynamism and guile to land an internship? Kids should not have the door slammed because someone bought their way in.

What do you think?

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com