This week, Carleton posted two unpaid, full-time summer internships on its website. These internships were scheduled to last the full four months of summer and were highly competitive. They were also completely unpaid and were not indicated to be worth academic credit.
This sets a dangerous precedent. The point of going to school and getting an education is the hope students will be paid for their professional qualifications and skills one day.
If universities can opt not to pay their own students, what is the value of the education students pay so much for? It’s no secret that tuition and living are expensive. To offer unpaid internships is to ask students to undergo unnecessary financial hardship. It also places no value on their skills and devalues the education they are paying so much to receive.
These internships are highly competitive. This means students have to compete for the opportunity to forgo what, in many cases, is income to carry them through the academic year, in order to gain experience that might give them an edge when they graduate.
In addition, not every student can afford to give up income and this ultimately means only reasonably wealthy applicants could benefit.
If there is no money to pay students for a summer’s worth of work, an internship like the ones posted should at least be worth academic credit. Students need to have something to gain by forgoing pay, besides a new entry on their resumé.
