Summer Internships for College Students Should Be Paid. To All Students and For All Jobs!
By Patricia Chadwick
It’s a commonly known fact that most students graduating from colleges across this country enter the workforce today carrying some level of college debt, a burden which now totals nearly $1.5 trillion, or 7% of all the indebtedness owed by the United States.
While the phenomenon of borrowing to get a higher education is not new in this country, the magnitude of the indebtedness has exploded, more than doubling over the last decade. Such a burden mitigates the favorable economic impact of new entrants to the labor force, as part of their income must first be directed to paying off their debt. Sadly, too, because of the size of the debt, the time it takes to become debt free has significantly extended.
Now that we are in campaign season, the air is full of promises by Presidential hopefuls to provide “free” higher education and to “forgive” all student debt. But we’re grownup enough to realize that such rhetoric is the “candy” that is tossed to a hopeful public to entice votes. Optimist that I am on many issues, I’m willing to wager that nothing of consequence will happen over the next ten years to reduce the liability students will carry with them as they migrate from being students to being workers.
And that gets me to the purpose of this column.
The vast majority of students in this country work during the summer from their senior year in high school until they graduate from college. They do so for a variety of reasons – to earn spending money for the upcoming school year, to mitigate the college debt that is accumulating and to enhance their resumés.
It is probably also true that many (maybe even most) of those summer jobs are less than exciting, but there is no harm in that – life is full of less than exciting elements and it’s good for young people to see the good, the bad and the ugly of the work place before they face the reality of a full-time job upon graduation.
But just because the job itself is either tedious or less than intellectually interesting does not mean that the students should not be compensated for their work. And there are thousands – maybe even hundreds of thousands – of summer “internships” that do not pay the student for their hours of work. Often the student is shocked to come to work on day one and discover that the employer is offering no compensation.
Forget the fact that the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a Federal law passed in 2009, was written in an attempt to mitigate the practice of trying to get away with free labor. The dirty little secret is that the practice continues. And what can the student, or even the student’s parents, do? There’s no recourse because there’s no “Department of Fair Pay for Interns”.
Why would any responsible company with an ounce of moral rectitude try to get away without paying its workers? The answer is simply because they can.
To be honest, this breach of ethics does not occur at large companies that have responsible Human Resources departments. In fact, many corporations in this country are increasingly becoming a solution to the student loan crisis by offering to pay off part of those loans as an employee benefit. That benefit can be a powerful “carrot” in the full employment world we currently enjoy.
The unfair practices are carried out mostly by the myriad small, private companies across the country that know they fly under the radar because there is little policing. The rationale they often use is that they cannot afford the expense of a minimum wage summer intern. If that is truly the case, then they should not hold themselves out as an organization that is willing to offer opportunities to students.
As an employer at a small not-for-profit health care company in Fairfield County, I took on two interns over the course of this past summer, each of them over sixteen years of age but not yet in college. Both were eager to get experience and we needed having an array of organization brought to our files (believe it or not in this electronic world, there are still many requirements for paper records). We paid them $13 per hour, because anything less than that in this high cost part of the country seemed unfair. It was only at the end of the summer that it was brought to my attention that one of the two interns was handing over all her wages to her family because her mother had recently been laid off.
It brought home with great impact how little we know about the needs of others. The least we can do is pay them an honest wage.
Patricia Chadwick is a businesswoman and an author. She recently published Little Sister, a memoir about her unusual childhood growing up in a cult. www.patriciachadwick.com
