As Connecticut lawmakers advance a bill to expand paid internships, the question is whether career-building experience is truly accessible to students who cannot afford to work for free.  

The proposal, H.B. 5478, is meant to expand access to paid internships by giving businesses incentives and creating more opportunities for students, especially those with financial need. Supporters say it could help students facing financial barriers, but questions remain about whether the funding structure reaches the businesses and students it’s designed to serve.  

H.B. 5478, known as “Learn and Earn,” targets three areas of the internship pipeline. First, it provides technical assistance to small businesses, working with Connecticut’s higher education system to teach employers how to build quality internship programs: from writing job descriptions to setting goals and creating metrics for interns.  

For students, the bill offers stipends for Pell Grant-eligible students to offset costs like transportation and work attire that often make participating in an internship financially out of reach. 

For businesses, it creates a tax credit to help pay their interns, and for nonprofits, which can’t claim corporate tax credits; a separate grant program serves the same purpose. The bill passed committee unanimously on March 17 and now awaits a House vote. 

Even so, Rep. Seth Bronko, the ranking Republican member of the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee, tempered expectations. 

“Everything up here is a fight for the dollars to fund it,” Bronko said. 

For small businesses, having the desire to offer internships and having the capacity to run them are two different things. 

Danielle Cloud, Policy Director at the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, said the person typically tasked with managing an internship program at a small business is rarely dedicated to that role alone.  

“Creating a quality internship program is hard for them to do sometimes, just because you get into the issues of not having the bandwidth to put a program together,” Cloud said.  

That’s where the technical assistance component of the bill comes in. By connecting small businesses with Connecticut’s higher education system, the bill aims to give employers the tools to build programs that prepare students for the workforce rather than filling gaps in office labor.

Bronko said the distinction matters. 

“We don’t want interns just being there to run for coffee,” he said. 

For Julian Bond, a 21-year-old senior majoring in computer science at CCSU, the barriers go beyond money. Even with a personal connection helping him land a potential internship at Travelers, Bond said the process exposed a frustrating pitfall many students face. Companies want experience, but internships are supposed to be how students get it in the first place.  

“You’ve never actually been in the work environment, so how do you know if it’s something you’re going to love?” Bond said. “By the time you’re a junior you’re kind of stuck.”

The challenge isn’t just running a good internship program, it’s being able to pay for one. Cloud said that 90% of CBIA’s members are businesses with 100 or fewer employees, many of whom operate without the financial flexibility to add intern salaries to their budgets.

For those businesses, the tax credit the bill creates isn’t just an incentive; it’s the difference between offering a paid internship and not offering one at all. 

“I’m often the one fighting for LLCs because they tend to get overlooked,” Bronko said.

The nonprofit sector faces the same problem from a different angle. Emmeline Franklin, Public Policy and Advocacy Associate at the CT Nonprofit Alliance, said her members want to pay their interns but the way nonprofit funding works makes it structurally difficult.  

“It’s not that our nonprofits don’t want to pay their interns, it’s just that they simply don’t have the flexible revenue,” Franklin said. 

Nonprofits operating on fixed government contract rates frequently have no budget line for intern salaries at all. Since nonprofits are tax-exempt and cannot claim the bill’s corporate tax credit, H.B. 5478 creates a separate program for them instead.

“We were really grateful to be included in the bill and for the bill to have a mechanism to speak to nonprofits,” Franklin said. 

The financial barrier doesn’t just affect the organizations offering internships, it hits the students trying to take them. Cloud said the costs that come with starting an internship are easy to overlook from the outside but add up quickly for students operating on tight budgets.

“I remember when I did my first internship, I was so broke. I could not afford nice work clothes,” Cloud said.

Joshua Brown, a 21-year-old senior majoring in management information systems at CCSU, has been searching for an internship since early sophomore year. During that span he turned down two opportunities specifically because they didn’t pay.

“I didn’t even have an option to say yes to the internship,” Brown said. “I need to pay for things; I just can’t do it.”

Brown said connections matter as much as qualifications in today’s job market.

“If you don’t have a network, applying blindly with a decent resume just isn’t enough nowadays,” Brown said.

His message to lawmakers voting on the bill was clear.

“There should be no job or internship where I work where it’s unpaid,” Brown said. “It’s just unreasonable in today’s world.”

Franklin shared a similar experience from her own time in graduate school, when she had to leave a full-time job and shift to part-time work to complete an unpaid internship required for her master’s degree in social work.

“Paid internships are really the only option for students who can’t afford to work for free,” Franklin said.

For Bronko, the bill is about more than one piece of legislation, it’s about whether Connecticut is willing to invest in keeping young talent in the state.

“We want it to be an actual useful experience to make a difference,” he said.

H.B. 5478 now heads to the full House, where its supporters hope the unanimous committee vote signals the same kind of bipartisan support on the floor. Whether it gets there and whether the funding structure holds up in the process will determine whether Connecticut’s answer to the internship access problem is built to last.