Unpaid internships cost more than are worth

Maybe it's just me, but I always get the feeling my parents were more independent than I am when they were my age.

I always hear about people of past generations working their way through college and supporting themselves during and after school. I've always kind of loved that image of the hardworking student who actually works outside of the classroom. I realize there are people who do this now, that some students have had the financial umbilical cord snipped and are going it alone through the jungle of bills and tuition payments. This is not the case for most of the people I know, including myself.

I'm not completely convinced the blame rests wholly upon this generation of students' shoulders. Seven and a half million of the 10 million American college students will have one or more internships before their graduation, according to the College Employment Research Institute. Seventy-five percent is a big chunk of the whole and seems to signify that students are trying to get their foot in the door of the so-called American workforce, so the question remains why students aren't able to save up money and use it the way their parents did.

One reason could be that only 34 percent of internships posted online by colleges and universities offer monetary compensation for intern work, according to a New York Times article from March 25, 2011. This sticks students in a double bind of the worst kind, seeing as many today view an internship as a prerequisite for a job in a related field. To have an internship, these students most likely will have to work a summer at a full-time job with an income sum of a giant goose egg.

Making this more difficult is the fact that most universities back these internship programs, handing out information about them in their career centers and encouraging students to apply for a position they won't be paid for. In return, schools offer a few credit hours for the internship. It is this agreement between higher institutions of learning and companies offering unpaid internships that allows these businesses to evade laws from the United States Department of Labor that requires employees to be paid for work, according to another New York Times article of April 2, 2011. In fact, many internship programs require the student to use it for college credit, which makes sense in light of the aforementioned agreement.

This doesn't seem so bad — give some credit hours to a student who decides to work in a field related to his or her studies for the summer, right? Wrong. Not only is the internship unpaid, students still are required to pay for the credit hours they earned during the internship. So in a number of cases, students have paid upwards of $2,000 to work for the summer.

In any other situation, what would we call this type of behavior? Ah, yes — exploitation. Here it just becomes overlooked.

While it is a crime to be taking someone's honest time and work and refusing to pay them for it or making them pay for it in a roundabout way, this type of behavior increases the gap in privileges that already exist based on students' parental financial situation. Some students' parents have enough money for their children to pay a couple thousand dollars to volunteer for a summer at an internship. Students who don't have this opportunity have to work somewhere that actually pays, which might not be at an internship, robbing them of networking opportunities and experience in their chosen field.

The bottom line is internships are a great way for students to become acquainted with an industry or to network. However, universities are not doing us any favors by offering credit in place of compensation. Breaking off these agreements or changing them in some way that makes them more educational and beneficial for students ultimately would be doing a service to future alumni, which in turn, helps the universities. A spin on "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours."

Anna Meier is a senior English major from Kansas City, Mo.