Long before summer begins, students all over the nation begin scouring the market for work opportunities, especially internships. Some get very lucky and land a job at a company that pays its interns, setting them on the path to a respectable full-time job. But many others are less fortunate; they end up with offers for unpaid internships, which they take because they think they will gain valuable work experience.

Blowing a hole in that theory is a recent study from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). It shows that students who participate in unpaid internships fare much worse in the American job market after college than those who held paid internships. The study found vast differences not only in job offer rates among college graduates but also in their starting salaries.

For example, the NACE study shows that there is a wide disparity between the rate of job offers among college graduates who held paid internships and those who were unpaid on the job. The job offer rate for graduates who had previously worked at a paid, for-profit internship was 72 percent vs. 44 percent for those who had participated in unpaid, for-profit internships. Starting salaries of those with paid internships were also higher than those of unpaid interns. As the NACE study notes “the graduate who had taken an unpaid internship in a for-profit firm was offered $19,000 less than the median paid intern in such firms.”

It is unclear how unpaid internships became so widespread. One theory is the bad economic state after the financial crisis in 2008 left companies with fewer resources to pay workers. At the same time, workers found it next to impossible to find paid jobs anywhere; they resorted to unpaid situations to gain the experience they thought the needed. But with the economy strengthening again, many questions have been raised about companies that continue to offer unpaid internships to students; many people are liking it to slave labor and it is unfair to the workers.

These days, it is becoming increasingly clear that unpaid internships are not ideal. Hard work for a company should be rewarded with a good paycheck and various benefits, like healthcare and other perks. It is clear that unpaid internships disenfranchise young students and set them back in their job searches. It all seems like another way in which big business is taking advantage of good, hardworking, everyday Americans.