Court case brings up internship concerns
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Hospitality business senior Kelley Tilma has worked about 11 hours a week since November 2011 in Lansing as a catering sales intern at the Lansing Center. She meets with clients, plans menus and takes event orders — all for free.
Although Tilma said the learning and networking opportunities she has had working as an unpaid intern are more valuable than the cost of taking the internship, critics, including some at MSU, are skeptical of recommending unpaid internships to students.
In a case brought to the Federal District Court in Manhattan earlier this month regarding a dispute over the legality of unpaid internships, an Ohio State University graduate is suing the parent company of Harper’s Bazaar fashion magazine, the Hearst Corporation, for allegedly violating federal and state wage and hour laws by not paying her even though she often worked there full time as an unpaid intern in 2011, according to The New York Times.
The case is an example of the concerns critics, such as Garth Motschenbacher, Director of Employer Relations in The Center for Spartan Engineering, have about unpaid internships.
“It is important students get benefit from anything they do,” he said. “But there is all kinds of research out there that says that at a certain point, things worth doing are worth getting paid for.”
In Recruiting Trends 2011-2012, an MSU publication prepared by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute and MSU Career Services Network, which surveyed more than 150 universities, the majority of salaries for internships and co-ops was between $10 and $15 per hour.
Motschenbacher said this is consistent with trends among students in the College of Engineering, where internships usually are for-profit, and range from $10 to $40 per hour, with the median income being about $17 per hour, he estimated.
“We don’t promote to our students nonpaid internships from an engineering perspective because there are too many paid,” he said, referring to co-op and internship opportunities.
The report also showed that of the about 3,000 employers surveyed, both from nonprofit and for-profit organizations, 66 percent offered paid internships, 18 percent offered unpaid internships and 16 percent offered a mix of the two.
Experiential Learning & On-Campus Internship Coordinator Bill Morgan said certain fields, such as communication, advertising and writing, are more traditionally linked with unpaid internships, and it is not uncommon for students pursuing field experience at MSU in those areas to take unpaid internships. He said the benefits of an internship are more about gaining relevant experience than about salary.
“Everybody seems to appreciate that, ultimately, you want an internship that is in something that you’re interested in,” Morgan said. “You’re looking for that work experience that you can relate to.”
Commonly, interns for nonprofit or government organizations are unpaid, he said. Most MSU students with internships work about 10 to 15 hours per week during the fall and spring semesters, but it is not uncommon for students to work as many as 40 hours per week at summer internships, Morgan said.
Tilma said although hours and the cost and pay were important when she was looking for an internship, the biggest factor she considered was how applicable the experience would be to her future career.
“I definitely wanted to make sure it was something that would benefit me in the long run when searching for jobs after graduation and gave me experience into what I want to do specifically,” she said.
