For years, students looking to get a summer credit-bearing internship have been forced to pay the high cost of interim session credits like any ordinary class. This may be changing; since prominent schools such as New York University and Columbia are changing their student internship rules that better comply with national labor laws.
According to the New York Times, NYU announced that they will now explicitly instruct employers that post internships on their job site to make sure that they follow the Labor Department’s guidelines and will delete posts that do not comply.
Columbia University is planning to stop offering college credit to students for internships. This being their method to take away the justification companies used to explain that they don’t need to pay their interns since they’re receiving credits for the work they do.
This is college credit that students pay for themselves. Students are essentially paying a minimum of $1000 to intern at a company for a summer. At Central Connecticut State University, students are charged $1,309 for three credits, which is the category most internships fall under.
A lot of the majors at CCSU require an internship for credit. These internships require students to work all day, all summer, in hopes of creating reliable contacts for future jobs. But students are not paid for all the hard work they do. Instead, the students have to pay for the work with no guarantees for employment when they leave.
An internship should benefit the intern. Not the company, not the university. It’s meant to be an experience for the student that benefits them with a skill set that the classroom cannot give them; something they can bring with them into the real world when they go out to find their first job.
This issue has arisen in the news before. In November of 2012, a class action law suit was filed against Hearst Corp., who owns several major magazines. Those former interns claimed that the company exploited their work over a period of six years.
In another high-profile case, Fox Searchlight Pictures was found guilty for violating New York labor laws with two of their interns, who essentially acted as employees. The judge also added that the interns weren’t placed in an educational environment and only the company benefited from their work.
Time Magazine claims that this lawsuit represents the end of unpaid internships as we know them. The Poynter Institute, which has done extensive research on the subject, said that one of the requirements of an unpaid internship is that it benefits the intern only, giving them experience. The company cannot use an intern to replace a normal paid employee.
Yet, this is exactly what many companies that employ interns do. They send the intern to do their dirty work or exploit them when they make mistakes, which give them no benefit.
CCSU should take into consideration what other universities like NYU and Columbia have, making internships available for students as something to do in their free time over a summer that would benefit the intern, and only the intern. The steep price of paying for college classes can deter some students from ever pursuing a degree in which a credit-bearing internship is required.