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Internships

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Dana Goldstein:

I recently picked up Ross Perlin’s “Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.” The book is a scathing critique of intern culture, which Perlin indicts as “unethical” and “illegal” for all the expected reasons: Low- and middle-income students don’t have equal access to the best internships; many internships don’t provide real learning opportunities; and internships have replaced good, paid, entry-level jobs at many companies and nonprofit organizations.

Where I take issue with Perlin is his solution to these problems: He proposes an “Intern Bill of Rights” that would require employers to pay almost all interns at least minimum wage. This would most certainly result in fewer internships, when what we really need to equalize opportunity are more internships organized through the school system. Every high school, community college and university student in America should be required to complete several internships for credit, and should be given time during the school day and year to intern.

Um… doesn’t this seem like a middling effort to solve problem 1 (access), while doing nothing about problem 2 (learning opportunities) and egregiously exacerbating problem 3 (free labor competing with paid labor)? I’m not even convinced that problem 1 is really being solved; at the high school and especially at the college level, the barrier between low and middle income students and “good” internships isn’t so much the lack of provision of college credit as it is the inability of students to relocate to where the “good” internships are.

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