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Among the six criteria is the following requirement: The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern.. In April, the Department of Labor crafted a six-part test that employers, students and colleges must satisfy to ensure that unpaid internships qualify as legal.

With experiential learning on the rise, through co-ops, internships and other approaches, the country cannot afford to create disincentives for employers to play a valuable role in the educational enterprise. However, just the threat of increased regulation could have a chilling effect on the willingness of employers to offer internships — paid or unpaid.

I ended up doing manual labor and clerical work instead of getting any experience in the field. Job shadowing a professional in a position of interest to me would have been more useful to me than stuffing envelopes. When I was in school, I was required to do an unpaid internship as part of my academic program (granted, I was given academic credit for my work) and the experience was utterly useless. The problem here, as I see it, is that college students are not always so lucky as to be placed in "well-developed internship" as the author defines the term.

As someone who’s spent a year or so studying what student internships (especially unpaid ones) mean for the US labor situation and the student-workers who fill them, what I find strange about the discussion that’s happened since the DoL’s announcement of the regulations is that the regulations are not actually new. These six points have been floating around on a number of websites and in college career services offices for years. When I called the DoL last October to try to find out how to cite them (they were not then on the website), no one (!) I talked to in several calls there could find out where they came from, despite the fact that they were attributed to the DoL.

Yes, they often amount to free labor for an organization, often "grunt labor", and this is bad enough. Casey, above, is on to the real problem with unpaid internships. Can your parents afford to send you to NYC to live for a summer and work for nothing? If not, you cannot take the internship, and if you cannot take the internship you will not be able to get your foot in the door for a career in the relevant field. Aoun is, indeed, defending a mechanism that serves primarily to further disadvantage those who are already disadvantaged. But they also serve to weed out students from poorer and even middle-class families. I guess it serves to keep the wrong sorts out of the white-collar work place, and perhaps that is its appeal??.

Yes, they often amount to free labor for an organization, often "grunt labor", and this is bad enough. Casey, above, is on to the real problem with unpaid internships. But they also serve to weed out students from poorer and even middle-class families. Can your parents afford to send you to NYC to live for a summer and work for nothing? If not, you cannot take the internship, and if you cannot take the internship you will not be able to get your foot in the door for a career in the relevant field. Aoun is, indeed, defending a mechanism that serves primarily to further disadvantage those who are already disadvantaged.

It makes him or her no better than someone with a paid internship. The intern transfers his or her labor to the organization offering the internship–organization gains what the intern loses–and as an additional return gets a seal of approval. Unpaid internships are an expensive signaling device that has no societal utility, and that the poorer among us can’t afford.

There should be limits, perhaps 10-12 weeks, that allow for a meaningful experience and protect against the abuse of labor laws. It is often hard to justify paid internships in corporate functions that do not contribute directly to the bottom line and only raise your overhead costs. The DOL should recognize the value an unpaid internship offers a student. 25 years ago, I did an unpaid internship because I wanted to get experience before I graduated. Had I not been on a scholarship that year, I probably would have pursued a paid internship first. That experience and being able to use that knowledge in the job search process was my "compensation." I have since worked 25 years for that company. There are always projects on a department’s wish list to get done, that could provide meaningful experiences.

A national survey of career center professionals conducted by INTERNSHIPS.com in May 2010 (www.internships.com/spring2010survey) reveals that the nations career center professionals see the DOL guidelines governing unpaid internships as unrealistic. A critical issue is the Federal mandate cited by President Aoun that employers not benefit from the work of interns. More than two-fifths (44 percent) of the survey respondents deem the mandate that the employer derives no immediate advantage from the activities of interns as unrealistic, compared to just 9 percent who assess it as realistic. Students who have successful internship experiences in small and large firms, government agencies, and non-profit organizations always bring benefit to the for-profit and non-profit organizations that sponsor the internship experience. Robin Richards President and CEO Internships.com.

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