New York:
IT'S been a rough summer so far for the Baltimore Orioles, Miley Cyrus and (it goes without saying) BP. Now, summer interns may have joined the list.
Between the sputtering economy and updated federal guidelines governing the employment of unpaid interns, many students have had a tougher time than they anticipated in landing résumé-enhancing experience this summer.
Tales of frustration abound. One junior at Penn State had his paid corporate internship offer revoked during the last week of classes this spring. A journalism student in Washington had to walk away from three internship opportunities because she wouldn't receive academic credit. After an "awesome" internship at a venture capital firm last summer, a student in an M.B.A. program in Los Angeles struggled to find 15 hours a week of unpaid work this time around. And at ESPN, Howard Hamilton, a vice president of human resources, said that 10,000 people applied this summer for 90 paid internship spots.
The internship culture has grown markedly in the last two decades. A survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers in 2008 found that 50 percent of graduating students had held internships, a striking increase from 17 percent in 1992. Forget burger flipping or ice cream scooping -- now even high school students seem anxious to obtain a few weeks of summer experience with "real" employers, fearing that colleges will look askance at applicants without substantive professional experience on the students' lists of summer activities.
As a result, the big-name internship has become coveted capital -- a reality that was showcased in the extreme when the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights recently auctioned media internships to help raise money for its cause. The opportunity to work -- unpaid -- went for some pretty big amounts: $2,900 at Vanity Fair, $9,000 at the Huffington Post -- and an eye-popping $42,500 at Vogue.
But the willingness of many young people to sacrifice pay for experience has led a number of states as well as the federal government to take a close look at the legality of hiring young people to work free. In April, the Obama administration issued a fact sheet listing six criteria aimed at preventing employers from violating the Fair Labor Standards Act with their unpaid internship programs. Among the stipulations: that the training the intern receives must be similar to training that can be obtained in an educational setting, that unpaid interns don't displace a paid employee, and that the employer does not derive any "benefit" from the intern's work.
The guidelines, from the Labor Department, have left employers scrambling to bulletproof their internship programs, said Camille Olson, a management-side employment attorney, who represents companies who have been dealing with this issue. Some employers, she said, have converted to paid internships but in the process have cut back on the number of posts they can offer. Others have abandoned their programs altogether.
Oscar Michelen, a labor lawyer in New York, said his son, a junior at Penn State, had secured a paid internship for the summer, but during his last week of classes the company suddenly pulled back the offer. "Companies were cutting back on the number," he said. "They said we can only offer paid positions to rising seniors." (The young man was able to find a six-week paid position at another firm.)
Dave Phillipson, the organizer of CEO Space, a California-based network of entrepreneurs, said he had been working on starting an internship program this summer but abandoned it "because of this silly ruling."
"I was an unpaid intern and I had no problem with it," he said.
The Atlantic Media Company, which publishes The Atlantic Monthly magazine and other print and digital publications, decided this spring to start paying its interns immediately -- and even compensate last year's interns retroactively. Many employers, however, especially those who have long-established unpaid internships, were reluctant to comment about whether they have instituted changes.But at least one employer has been outspoken. John Stossel, a former anchor on ABC's "20/20" who now hosts his own show on the Fox Business Network, has been sounding off about the issue all over print, the airwaves and cyberspace. He even donned a police uniform for an appearance on the Fox News program "America Live" to ridicule the crackdown.
"I've built my career on unpaid interns," he said in the interview, "and the interns told me it was great -- I learned more from you than I did in college." (Asked why he didn't pay them if they were so valuable, he said he didn't have the money.)
Many people believe a focus on unpaid internships is an important effort to protect young people from economic exploitation, as well as to even the intern playing field so students who can afford to work without pay aren't the overwhelming beneficiaries of internship experience. But some worry that the crackdown may actually limit their opportunities.
Sarah Green, a 20-year-old art history major at Emory University, landed a prestigious internship last summer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year she hoped to return to the New York art world. She applied to every auction house and museum she could find for both paid and unpaid spots. Every place turned her down, with some explaining they'd cut back on the number of interns they now hire. The experience may have been a career-changer for Ms. Green. "I took this as a sign that I was not meant to work in the fine arts," she said. Instead she enrolled in summer courses in graphic design and advertising and has now decided to apply to a graduate program in art direction for advertising.
Most employers aren't entirely eliminating their unpaid internship programs but are instead becoming sticklers, requiring that schools grant credit to any person they hire for an unpaid internship. That can be difficult for some students. Alyssa Wolice, a journalism major at American University in Washington, had to walk away from three promising internship opportunities -- one at a sports organization and two at news organizations -- because all three employers insisted she obtain credit from her university.
There were two problems with that stipulation for Ms. Wolice. First, she had already been granted the maximum number of credits that American allows for internships in her degree program. But even if she hadn't, she says she couldn't afford the estimated $1,000 she would have had to pay American for the credits. She's already planning to graduate a semester early to save on tuition. She ended up finding a part-time paid internship, but it's not in journalism; it's a post at the federal Food and Drug Administration.
Emily Lennox, a 25-year-old M.B.A. candidate at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said the academic credit requirement hadn't arisen last summer when she took an unpaid internship at a venture capital firm, a position she said provided a valuable "quick immersion" into the business world. "This year it was more difficult," she said. She finally found two part-time unpaid internships, though she said she has since quit one out of dissatisfaction. But, she added, she is learning a lot in the other -- a 15-hour-a-week stint at a start-up retail firm.
Other students are finding ways to get around the federal requirements. "Kids don't necessarily have to go back to their university to get the credit," said Jill Tipograph, the founder and chief executive of Everything Summer, which works with families to help them find camps and summer internships.
Kathryn Ciano, a law student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., who aspires to become a legal journalist, worked through a group called the Institute for Humane Studies, which helped place her in an unpaid internship at Fox Business News in New York and awarded her a $3,200 stipend. But Fox still required her to obtain a letter showing she was receiving academic credit for the work. Her law school wouldn't grant credit for a journalism internship, however. So she found a community college in Los Angeles that would award her credit and furnish the required letter for $200 -- much less than she would have had to pay George Mason.
Ms Ciano's internship sounds like the type of post the new rules might call into question -- 40 to 50 hours a week working on the development of a new show. But Ms. Ciano said the hands-on experience has been terrific. "It's really wonderful," she said. "They're really nurturing, great mentors."