Biting the Hand That Doesn’t Feed Me
Internships for college credit are a scam.
Slate Magazine. June 8. 2006.
On your next summer trip to Disneyland, take another look at the person in the mouse costume: He or she might be a college student. Disneyland now offers amusement park “summer internships,” the Los Angeles Times reported last month. Interns play “front-line roles”—operating the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, dispensing colorful slush drinks, and hawking Disney schlock. A similar program has been operating at Orlando’s Walt Disney World since 2000.
While you ponder the academic merits of spending a summer dressed up like Minnie, give Disney credit for compensating the students for their labor, at more than the minimum wage, as well as asking them to get course credit. In other fields, by contrast, college credit without pay is becoming the norm. According to an April 2006 survey from Vault.com, 84 percent of college students complete an internship before graduation and 64 percent of those students reported being paid. However, the majority of internships in the fields of politics and journalism are typically unpaid. Using the listings in the 2005 edition of The Internship Bible, I calculated that 52 percent of magazine internships, 54 percent of politics and public-policy internships, 62 percent of TV internships, and 71 percent of radio internships are unpaid. (Newspapers are the exception to the media rule, with only 19 percent of the listed positions going unpaid.) Washington, D.C., where I have lived and studied for the last four years, is ground zero for unpaid summer interns, but they also dot the country.