Once you have reached junior and senior level standing in college, then your summers can no longer be spent working part-time at the local fast food restaurant. At this point in your college career, internships become what’s keeping you up at night, along with that mountain of school-work you have to do. Applying to internships can become a full-time job, that as a college student, you don’t really have the time for.
As you find yourself scrolling through the list of potential summer internships, you will without a doubt be encountering unpaid internships. While these internships are offering students experience, not everything about them benefits the students.
Many students cannot take an unpaid position. I have been lucky enough to move home with my parents for the summer, but I am still looking for a part-time job just to pay for gas money. There are many students who are not as lucky as I am and cannot sacrifice the money that could be made from full-time job.
Employers are limited the pool of applicants they can pull from because of their unpaid internships. If companies offer paid internships, they will have a more diverse group of applicants to choose from.
As a college student, your major may require that you have an internship before graduation, or you may be thinking that an internship is a way to get your foot in the door. While this may have been the case for previous generations, this no longer holds true. Internships, or rather unpaid internships, do not have the same benefits that they once did.
An unpaid internship does not guarantee you a job after graduation, no internship is a guarantee for a job. The National Association of College and Employers has gathered data, suggesting that those who have completed an unpaid internship had almost the same odds of getting a job as those who had not completed an internship at all. Often times unpaid internships sets students up to be more willing to take lower paid jobs after graduation. Internships are supposed to benefit the students that undertake them, but it is often the companies who employ them that benefit.
Businesses exist not only to provide a customer with a good or service, but they also exist to create a profit. It seems as though far too many businesses are focused on this bottom line, than they are with the people they employ. Internships once offered students an opportunity to become trained in their future careers but this is no longer the case. Internships are often requiring several years of experience. This is not just for the paid internships but for the unpaid internships as well. Companies who are employing these students, through both paid and unpaid internships, are no longer investing in these students.
Companies across the nation, and the globe, are not just going to wake up one day and decide to pay their interns. If students continue to be willing to work for free, then employees are going to continue to offer unpaid internships.
