Arguing that “unpaid internships provide access only to students from wealthy families,” economist Edward Glaeser suggests making new loans available to low-income interns:
[I]t’s unrealistic to think individual private businesses will provide new skills to temporary, not-yet-qualified workers simply out of public benevolence. Throughout much of Western history, young apprentices paid to learn – either explicitly with cash or implicitly by working for little pay. … One solution might be to expand federal student loan programs to cover students taking unpaid internships, whether or not they receive college credit for them, or even recent graduates. I would set a high bar for making internships eligible for such loans, by requiring official certification of their educational quality. With a loan program in place, more widespread unpaid internships could help move young Americans toward permanent employment. Internships provide a pathway towards employment that should be encouraged – not penalized.
Jordan Weissman counters, “If you’re a broke 23-year-old, the concept of taking out debt for an unpaid internship probably sounds something like the two-headed hell-hound of your financial nightmares”:
I can sort of see how this line of thinking would develop. If you really, truly believe a dearth of skills, rather than a slow economy, is the problem hampering college graduates in today’s job market, you might see internships as a tonic. After all, Germany and other European countries run very successful apprenticeship programs that prepare young adults for careers (though those apprenticeships are paid). And if you believe the only downside to unpaid internships are the class issues, then student loans might sound like an elegant solution. We are just talking about more education. What’s so wrong with financing it? Plenty.
To start, I’m not sure how someone can look at the state of student debt, all $1 trillion of it and change, then decide the government needs to make a whole new class of loans. Nor is it really apparent that skills are the great problem holding back BA’s, given the cyclical nature of their employment woes. Glaeser also glosses over the lack of evidence that unpaid internships regularly lead to work. … In the end, Glaeser is essentially asking government to subsidize entry level employment at for-profit companies who have realized that many young people don’t have to be paid for their work. Because that’s what internships are: work.
Which is why Dish Publishing LLC provides both pay and health insurance to our interns; good work deserves compensation. And we don’t want to cut off working-class candidates who couldn’t afford the internship otherwise. Why close ourselves off from a large segment of talent?
Update from a reader:
I wanted to write and let you know that a fairly common form of student loans for internships already exists, albeit only while you are still enrolled. I know because I had to take out a loan to afford clerking unpaid for the Orleans Public Defenders a few years ago. It’s a very desirable internship for those that are interested in public interest law (and highly recommended), an opportunity I immediately accepted.
In law school, even at a public university, I already had a lot of debt, including some from under-grad (also at a public school, in-state), so I had very little disposable income, certainly not enough to pay for rent on my lease where I went to school and also for a place in New Orleans, not to mention moving, living expenses, etc. So I took my law school’s internship class for credit over the summer while working at the clerkship. This allowed me to qualify for several thousand dollars in cost-of-living student loans to work unpaid at the public defenders office.
The loans on their own didn’t bother me so much because unlike a lot of unpaid corporate internships this was a really desirable cause, at least to me (no, I don’t mean advancing my resume), and they genuinely did not have resources to pay us. However, the class I took, like most internship credit classes, was not really educational in any meaningful way. It consisted of keeping a journal of my activities and writing a few essays about what I was learning, time I felt could have been better spent serving indigent clients/ working. In addition to the thousands in loans I took out for living expenses, I also paid several thousand dollars for this “class.” In other words, I pretty much paid the university to work for free, but I wouldn’t have qualified for the loans I needed to live unless I took the lightweight class. I would have much rather spent that money on a substantive class, not paying for an unpaid internship.
By the way, you paying your interns, and the reasons why, definitely pushed me over the edge into [tinypass_offer text=”subscribing”] very early on. I’m an avid reader of news, almost exclusively online, and this is the first and only content I’ve paid for to date (should I feel bad…?).
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