Are Unpaid Internships Worth the Effort?

The world in which we live and work is sometimes called The Experience Economy.

Both in terms of the experiences enjoyed (or endured) and the experience gained. The purpose of internships has generally been to provide the intern with some experience of the working/professional world and of the organization in which the intern labors while providing the hiring entity with a look at potential employees who may offer some inexpensive extra help. We refrain from using the word 'free,' even for unpaid interns, because there is invariably a cost to supervising, managing and keeping the intern from actually doing any damage, especially to him or herself.

As the economy worsened and then failed to recover, the popularity of unpaid internships, once seen as unfair, has grown. It saves the institution a bit of money without necessarily reducing the already dubious quality of the effort received. Intern candidates are hardly in a position to argue and have meekly accepted this new, even more humiliating status. Parents grumble but acquiesce on the assumption that some experience is better than none.

And it turns out that may be true. But not by much.

Recent research suggests that those who manage to secure paid internships are twice as likely to get job offers as those who interned for free. Which stands to reason; if someone is worth paying, they are probably worth hiring, at least theoretically. And if an organization is wealthy enough to pay interns, they are probably wealthy enough to hire full-time staff. But one senses that those paid internships are far less available than the unpaid variety. And that brings us back to the point of the exercise: the world is neither perfect, equal or fair. You take what you can get and try to leverage into something better. The only question is whether, when they are in a position themselves to hire interns, the current crop will try to do better by their successors. JL

Melissa Korn reports in the Wall Street Journal:

It’s drilled into college students’ heads from day one: get an internship, you’ll get a job.

But a new survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers finds that the equation isn’t quite so tidy. That internship might lead to a job–but your chances are far better if you’re getting paid.
The group released a study this week showing that 60% of 2012 graduates who worked a paid internship got at least one job offer, while just 37% of those in unpaid gigs got any offers. That’s slightly – only slightly – better than the offer rate for graduates who skipped internships entirely, at 36%.

Unpaid internships are ubiquitous. A 2010 survey from NACE found that nearly 95% of member schools allow organizations to post unpaid internship opportunities, and less than a third of those require students to earn academic credit or some form of certificate for their work. Intern Bridge, a recruiting research and consulting firm, found that more than half of internships reported for its 2011 Internship Salary Report were unpaid.

NACE’s new numbers would suggest that unpaid internships just aren’t worth it, if you’re trying to better your long-term prospects. (So would arguments that companies are just exploiting desperate students.)

But that’s not the whole story.

“The goal of an internship is not to make money, ever,” says Heather R. Huhman, author of “Lies, Damned Lies & Internships” and other career-related books. Instead, internships are supposed to help a student learn more about a prospective field, gain experience in that field and supplement their classroom education. Any payment should be viewed as a “bonus,” Huhman says.

While NACE says some of the difference in job offers for paid and unpaid interns can be explained by the fact that paid interns spend do more substantive work than do their unpaid counterparts, Huhman doesn’t buy it. After all, paid interns may actually be assigned less job-relevant tasks, like fetching dry cleaning, because managers reason that those interns have little leverage to complain.

And anyway, who else needs to know that an internship was unpaid? Certainly not future recruiters. “It’s not like looking at a resume, a position screams paid or unpaid,” Huhman says.