Paying for the chance to be unpaid?

Not getting paid as an intern is pretty basic. I’ve done a few unpaid internships because the industries I was interested in (film, publishing, marketing, to name a few), don’t tend to pay. Sure, my packed lunch tasted a bit stale next to the splurges my friends interning at banks were able to indulge in. But I accepted that it was a part of the game. I was able to make my unpaid summers manageable by staying with generous friends, tapping into savings, and keeping a very strict budget. I was incredibly privileged to be able to take an unpaid job. I knew many people for whom this would absolutely not be an option. The experiences were wonderful, and definitely worth it. I made great contacts, developed useful skills and learned about new industries from the inside.

But would I have paid for my unpaid internship? I don’t think so. It felt like I was paying enough simply by not being paid.

Then again, I was lucky enough to go to a college with great connections, to be relatively well-connected myself, and to be the kind of persistent applicant that doesn’t take no for an answer. If I had been a little shyer, a little less connected, and a little richer- would I have paid for the opportunity to have those summer experiences? Should I judge people who do?

Gerry Shih, an intern for The New York Times (paid, as the note points out, and I’m going to guess, not placed by an agency), wrote an article about just that: college students and recent grads who pay internship placement services to secure an internship for them. It seems to be paying off. Take Francois Goffinet:

Francois Goffinet entered the University of Dreams program in 2007 as a student at William and Mary College, he said, because he wanted an internship at a top bank but those banks did not recruit at colleges like his. The University of Dreams advisers polished Francois’s résumé. They coached him on interviews and then helped him secure an internship at UBS, which he then converted into a job offer.

The kind of banks that Francois wanted to work for don’t recruit at his college. That’s an undeniable disadvantage. Could he still have gotten the internship on his own? Sure. If he really is a qualified candidate even without the thousand-dollar placement services backing, then there are always ways to reach out to and win over an employer even if they don’t recruit directly at your school. It’s called persistence and ingenuity. In fact, a friend of mine from Stockholm proved that it’s possible. Sweden’s a small place, and so many of the top banks and consultancies only  recruit actively at one school: the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE). Some make it clear that they will only consider SSE applicants. My friend, who is not an SSE graduate, proved that such policies are never written in stone. He worked like hell being a star in his school’s economics program, then networked skillfully on his own— often getting the businesses’ attention by memorable cover letters and relentless persistence. Guess what? He got first the internship and then the job he wanted.

The costs for the internship placement agencies that Shih reports are staggering- often over 8,000 dollars for a summer in New York. For that price tag, they place you in housing and provide certain meals too- effectively stripping all real-world responsibility from the interns-to-be. No need to wrestle with the complicated NYC housing market, no need to cook or pay bills. It sounds almost like summer camp for college kids- with a resume perk rather than an archery badge at the end of it.

As an employer, I would be a bit wary of the kind of applicants who pay someone to do the dirty work for them. Are they the better applicant or simply better off? But a lot of employers obviously don’t feel that way. Shih writes:

Employers say the middlemen save them time and hassle. “They make the search process a lot easier,” said Sarah Cirkiel, the chief executive of Pitch Control Public Relations, a small New York firm that started four years ago and has taken in 20 summer interns, all from the University of Dreams. “I feel like they hand-select their interns for the specific agencies to make sure it’s the right fit. They just show up at our doorstep, ready to go.

So maybe I’m wrong. But, as a Gen Y:er myself, this seems like the kind of Gen Y entitlement-ridden shortcut older generations are always griping about. It rubs me the wrong way. There is a sense that this service will level the playing field between the have and have nots- when it comes to who has valuable contacts, that is. But, as Shih points out, paying for an internship further privileges the privileged—most college students can’t afford to take an unpaid internship, let alone pay to take an unpaid internship.

What’s more, finding and getting my unpaid internships, as well as the real-world experience of managing housing and meals on a tight budget, taught me skills that were almost as invaluable as what I learned on the job. It was tough, but I would rather do it all over again than have an agency deal with it for me. College kids are often coddled enough at school (I know I was). Summer can be the time to get a taste of something more real– like bills. And that’s a valuable lesson.

I’d be curious to hear what you think. Thousands of dollars for internship placement: yay or nay?

- Astri

ps. Chris Ross, another True/Slant contributor, mention the phenomenon after reading a WSJ article about it back in January. Check his post out here.