Internships tend to advantage students who are already advantaged—essentially those who can afford to work for cheap or free.

According to data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers 2021 Student Survey, 74 percent of white students said they’d had unpaid internships and 73 percent had paid internships, compared to 8 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively, for Black students and 10.2 percent and 7 percent for Hispanic or Latinx students. Among first-generation students, 25.6 percent reported they were unpaid interns and 20.5 percent were paid.

And paid internships tend to pay off, making it more likely for students to land a job after college. According to NACE, students who’d worked as paid interns received an average of 1.12 job offers in 2021, while unpaid interns got an average of 0.85 and those with no internship experience received 0.64 job offers.

No wonder many institutions are working to end unpaid internships.

“I’ve been seeing a lot of interest outside of career center offices and internship coordinators to make sure that most internships, if not all of them, are paid,” said Matthew Hora, co-director of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “I think it’s been a long-standing concern.”

Initially community colleges led the fight against unpaid internships, since those institutions already had more lower-income students, but in recent years more R-1 institutions have joined in, said Hora.

“Especially if there’s relocation costs, like to D.C., Chicago or New York, an unpaid internship basically is out of reach for most college students,” Hora said. “What that means is you’re imposing a gatekeeping mechanism on entering into these experiences and making them unpaid and out of reach to possibly the majority of college students. I think they’re definitely unfair, exclusionary and undemocratic.”

Read the full article about unpaid internships by Maria Carrasco at Inside Higher Ed.