Unpaid interns are getting a raw deal.
CNNMoney reports that on top of working for no pay, unpaid interns are far less likely than their paid counterparts to get a full-time job offer after the internship ends, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
Unpaid interns received full-time job offers about 44% of the time. Paid interns were offered jobs 72% of the time, the survey found.
“Employers rightly look at a paid internship as more of a real job,” Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington research group, tells CNNMoney. “If you were paid for something, there was probably more valuable work done.”
Even the unpaid interns who received full-time job offers were paid less out of the gate. At private companies, unpaid interns received a median job offer of about $34,400. Paid interns at private firms were offered jobs with a median salary of $53,521, NACE found.
“An unpaid internship signals that you have been willing to work for nothing, therefore you might be willing to accept a lower job offer than a paid intern would,” says Eisenbrey. (Interns at EPI are paid, he says).
There’s been a lot of criticism about unpaid internships, including whether they violate labor laws. Some experts argue that only well-off students can afford to take advantage of unpaid internships, while lower income students must take summer jobs to earn money.
The White House, for example, has been criticized for not paying its interns.
No official stats track the number of unpaid interns every year, but estimates vary from 500,000 to 1 million.
CNNMoney has the full story.
