There are few, if any, experts on the sprawling subject of internships, and little research is available. One-on-one interviews—conducted in person, by phone, and via email between 2008 and 2010—form the core of this book. I’ve talked to hundreds of people across the U.S., indeed around their world, about internships they’ve participated in, managed, witnessed, and heard about. It was inevitably what a sociologist would call a convenience sample, and I hope that this initial look at internships—wide-ranging but still impressionistic, empirically minded but still lacking in rigorously collected data—will prompt further work.
Many people I spoke with, especially former interns, were reluctant to use their real names or the real name of their employer—completely understandable, given that so many interns leave their work with little more besides precarious references and weak relationships. Real names are generally used for noninterns; first names that appear in quotation marks are inventions, and in some cases other identifying information has been obscured as well. Besides interviews, I’ve also drawn on a wide range of other materials, including traditional sources such as media reports and academic papers, but also online forums, guidebooks, video materials, pop culture references and so on.
1 For a hair-raising account of an absurd war-zone internship, see Willem Marx, “I Was a PR Intern in Iraq,” Harper’s Magazine, September 18, 2006, reprinted by Alternet at alternet.org/story/41479.
2 BNO News, “Dutch teenage girls take ‘internship’ as prostitutes,” December 15, 2010, channel6newsonline.com.
3 Jeffrey Tucker, “War on Internships: Should Unpaid Internships Be Regulated?”, The Christian Science Monitor, April 7, 2010.
4 The number of students attending four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. is drawn from the Census Bureau’s “Current Population Survey” (CPS), October 2008. There are no authoritative statistics for the percentage of college students involved in internships, or the number of internships undertaken each year. But 75 percent of student participation is based on impressionistic surveys conducted by two career information websites, Vault and Quintessential Careers, and the comments of Phil Gardner of the College Employment Research Institute, all discussed in Chapter 2. The figure of between 1 and 2 million internships in the U.S. each year is my own, calculating that the current enrolled population will account for some 6 million internships (perhaps 75 percent of the 8 million enrolled students). Divided evenly over four or even five years of school, that means 1.2 to 1.5 million undergraduate internships each year.
5 For middle-aged interns, see Elizabeth Pope, “Testing the Waters with Internships,” New York Times, April 21, 2008 and Amy Farnsworth, “Rise of the 40-Something Intern,” The Christian Science Monitor, June 26, 2009. See Steven Greenhouse, “Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal,” New York Times, April 2, 2010 and “Fact Sheet #71: Internship Programs Under the Fair Labor Standards Act” issued by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in April 2010 and accessible at dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm.
1 Baudrillard’s comment, from his 1983 essay “Simulacra and Simulations,” refers to the original Disneyland in southern California, but if anything it applies with even greater force to the more complete universe of Disney World in Orlando.
2 Wesley Jones, Mousecatraz: The Walt Disney World College Program, 2006, Lulu.com.
3 “Disney Internships Draw Students, Criticism,” The Associated Press, July 5, 2005.
4 For Goffman’s classic formulation of the “total institution,” see Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.
5 For a recent introduction to “Disney Studies”—and there’s a lot out there—see Thomas Doherty, “The Wonderful World of Disney Studies,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 21, 2006.
6 For more on the Reedy Creek Improvement Distrcit, see Joshua Wolf Shenk, “Hidden Kingdom: Disney’s Political Blueprint,” The American Prospect, March 21, 1995.
7 NACE Executive Director Marilyn Mackes would not comment on her involvement with the Disney program, other than to write: “I would recommend more research through Disney directly to learn the scope and depth of the experiences offered.”
8 Bruce Nissen, Eric Schutz, and Yue Zhang, “Walt Disney World’s Hidden Costs: The Impact of Disney’s Wage Structure on the Greater Orlando Area,” Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy, Center for Labor Research and Studies, Florida International University, March 19, 2007.
9 See Jane Kuenz, Susan Willis, Shelton Waldrep, Stanley Fish, eds., Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 110–63.
1 Michael True, director of the Internship Center at Messiah College, also runs the Internship-Net listserv, an active email forum, primarily for college career counselors, from which this proposed definition of “academic internship” is drawn.
2 The American figures are drawn from The Debate Over Unpaid College Internships, published by Intern Bridge in 2010. The U.K. research, announced in mid-2010, was produced by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and included a recommendation for paying interns at least a low training wage. The German figure, published in 2008, comes by a survey undertaken by the country’s International Institute for Empirical Socioeconomics (INIFES).
3 Stone’s results are described in Jim Frederick, “Internment Camp: The Intern Economy and the Culture Trust,” Baffler, no. 9, 1997: 51–8. The numbers concerning game design and law enforcement internships come from “2010 Internship Salary Report,” published by Intern Bridge.
4 For the Michigan State study, see Philip Gardner, Georgia Chao, and Jessica Hurst, “Ready for Prime Time? How Internships and Co-ops Affect Decisions on Full-time Job Offers, White Paper, Fall 2008, MonsterTRAK.com.
5 The NACE figure is found in their Job Outlook 2009.
6 See Rosemary Stevens, “Graduate Medical Education: A Continuing History,” Journal of Medical Education, vol. 53, January 1978: 1–18.
7 For education, see Anonymous, “Intern System Urged for Schools,” The Science News-Letter, vol. 14, no. 403, Dec. 29, 1928, Reports of AAAS New York Meeting, 399–400. For accounting, S. G. Winter, “The Next Decade in Accounting,” The Accounting Review, vol. 3, no. 3, September 1928, 311–22. For marketing, See D. J. Duncan, “The Teaching of Advanced Marketing Courses in Specialized Programs,” The Journal of Marketing, vol. 1, no. 4, April 1937: 379–82.
8 There are three detailed and illuminating accounts of the National Institute for Public Affairs’ pioneering internship program, written by its directors in the early years: Otis Theodore Wingo, “Interneship [sic] Training in the Public Service,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 189, January 1937: 154–8; Otis Theodore Wingo, “Training for Public Administration,” The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 8, no. 2, February 1937: 84–8; and Henry Reining, Jr., “Internship Training for Public Service”, Journal of Educational Sociology, vol. 14, no. 5, January 1941: 286–91. There is also a useful account from the intern perspective, written a half-century after the fact, contained in Herbert Kaufman, “Music of the Squares: A Lifetime of Study of Public Administration,” Public Administration Review, vol. 56, no. 2, March–April 1996: 127–38.
9 Anne E. Polivka and Thomas Nardone, “On the Definition of ‘Contingent Work,’ ” Monthly Labor Review, vol. 112, 1989. Freedman first described “contingent employment arrangements” at a 1985 conference on employment security. See also Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, New York: NYU Press, 2009.
10 James N. Baron, Frank R. Dobbin, and P. Devereaux Jennings, “War and Peace: The Evolution of Modern Personnel Administration in U.S. Industry,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 92, issue 2, September 1986: 350–83. Pamela S. Tolbert and Lynne G. Zucker, “Institutional Sources of Change in the Formal Structure of Organizations: The Diffusion of Civil Service Reform, 1880–1935,” Administrative Science Quarterly 28, 1983: 22–39.
1 For more details and stories on modern apprenticeships in the U.S., see the Registered Apprenticeship website (21stcenturyapprenticeship.workforce3one.org). Bob Lerman, Lauren Eyster, and Kate Chambers, The Benefits and Challenges of Registered Apprenticeship: The Sponsors’ Perspective, The Urban Institute Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population, March 2009, makes a case for the program’s usefulness to employers.
2 The Washington State info comes from “Washington State Workforce Board 2008 Evaluation of Apprenticeship,” available at 21stcentury apprenticeship.workforce3one.org/view/2000911459872740346/info.
3 See Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, “Failure to Become Freemen: Urban Apprentices in Early Modern England,” Social History, vol. 16, no. 2, May 1991: 155–72; Margaret Pelling, “Apprenticeship, Health, and Social Cohesion in Early Modern London,” History Workshop Journal Issue 37, 1994; and Gillian Hamilton, “The Decline of Apprenticeship in North America: Evidence from Montreal,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 60, no. 3, September 2000.
4 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, New York: Vintage Books, 1985.
5 Media Monkey, “Grazia Staffers in a Froth,” Guardian, December 21, 2009.
6 Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, New York: Dover Publications, 1996.
7 See W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
8 See Daniel Jacoby, “The Transformation of Industrial Apprenticeship in the United States,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 51, no. 4, December 1991: 887–910, and Bernard Elbaum, “Why Apprenticeship Persisted in Britain but Not in the United States,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 49, no. 2, June 1989: 337–49.
9 Joan Lane, Apprenticeship in England 1600–1914, London: UCL Press, 1996, p. 19.
1 For the attempt to replace regular staff with interns at The Point Reyes Light, the newspaper in question, see Josh Chin’s blog post “Point Reyes Light: Appalling Hubris of a Young Editor (OR Take this Internship and Shove It Right Up Your Ass),” chinfamous.com.
2 David C. Yamada, “The Employment Rights of Student Interns,” 35 Conn. L. Rev. 215, 217, 2002 is the most comprehensive treatment of the legal issues bearing on internships.
3 Elena de Lisser, “Firm in Atlanta Settles Dispute over Interns,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 1995.
4 Avakian’s comments were made on the Oregon Public Broadcasting show Think Out Loud, which ran a segment called “Internships 101” on April 26, 2010.
5 Chevalier’s estimate is reported in Jethro Mullen, “Interns in French Firms Stage Protest,” New York Times, November 24, 2005.
6 The national survey on wage theft and pervasive FLSA violations is by the National Employment Law Project, Just Pay: Improving Wage and Hour Enforcement at the United States Department of Labor, New York: NELP, 2010.
7 Michael Walsh’s blog is at californiawagelaw.com.
8 Wiley’s corporate communications director notes that the company pays those students who are not receiving academic credit, adding that a “key benefit (for interns and the company) is that internships frequently lead to full-time permanent jobs.”
9 See Cynthia Grant Bowman and MaryBeth Lipp, “Legal Limbo of the Student Intern: The Responsibility of Colleges and Universities to Protect Student Interns Against Sexual Harassment,” Harvard Women’s Law Journal, vol. 23, 2000. The economics professors at Bates is quoted in Sara Lipka, “Would You Like Credit with that Internship?”, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 9, 2010.
10 Craig J. Ortner, “Adapting Title VII to Modern Employment Realities: The Case for the Unpaid Intern,” Fordham Law Review, vol. 66, 1998.
11 James LaRocca, “Lowery v. Klemm: A Failed Attempt at Providing Unpaid Interns and Volunteers with Adequate Employment Protections,” Public Interest Law Journal, Vol. 16, 2006.
1 Lipka, “Would You Like Credit with that Internship?”
2 Donald T. O’Connor, “The Price of Free Labor: Companies Using Interns as Unpaid Employees May Run Afoul of Wage Laws,” ABA Journal, January 1997.
3 David Gregory, “The Problematic Employment Dynamics of Student Internships,” Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, vol. 12, 1998: 227–64.
4 See Tom Peter, “Unpaid Interns Struggle to Make Ends Meet,” The Christian Science Monitor, March 5, 2007. The survey of 713 colleges was conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) in May 2010.
5 Lipka, “Would You Like Credit With That Internship?”
6 Lindsey Gerdes, “Goldman Picks Former Interns for Jobs as Hiring Drops,” Bloomberg.com, December 11, 2009.
7 G. Jeffrey MacDonald, “International Internships Propel Students,” USA Today, April 26, 2007. Jonelle Marte, “Creating Internships Out of Thin Air,” Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2010.
8 Paul Hager, “Conceptions of Learning and Understanding Learning at Work,” Studies in Continuing Education, vol. 26 (1), 1994.
9 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso, 2005.
10 Figures drawn from Bill Ferris, “Cooperative Education: Neglected Winner,” Journal of Higher Education, vol. 40, no. 6, June 1969, pp. 480–3, and Ann Carlson, “Co-op Planet: Organizations at NU Plant Co-op’s Seeds Far and Wide,” Northeastern University Magazine 24 (5), May 1999. See also Richard Walter, “The Rebirth of Cooperative Education,” Journal of Industrial Teacher Education, vol. 32, no. 1, Fall 1994.
1 Politico Staff, “D.C. Interns by the Numbers,” July 14, 2009, politico.com.
2 Andrew Morton, Monica’s Story, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, p. 70.
3 The memoir by JFK’s former intern Mimi Beardsley Alford is reportedly being published by Random House. Sullivan’s comment can be found in Andrew Sullivan, “Sex and this City: Even Without the Harsh Glare of Scandal, Washington’s Sexual Dynamic Has Always Had a Uniquely Predatory Cast,” New York Times Magazine, July 22, 2001.
4 For a discussion of interns in the British Parliament, see Rowenna Davis, “House of Poshos,” New Statesman, February 18, 2010.
5 Joe Davidson, “Obama to Shut Down Federal Career Intern Program,” Washington Post, December 26, 2010.
6 Sharlet discussed the intern’s situation on “The Rachel Maddow Show” in April 2010. See “C Street House Used Interns as Servants, Author Tells Rachel Maddow,” huffingtonpost.com.
7 Rob Reich, Lacey Dorn, and Stefanie Sutton, Anything Goes: Approval of Nonprofit Status by the IRS, Stanford University Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, 2009.
8 Karen Gieselman and Wendy Smith, “Do Your Internships Comply with Wage-Hour Law?”, Education Labor Letter, Fisher and Phillips’ Education Practice Group, November–December 2007.
1 Anya Kamenetz, “Take This Internship and Shove It,” New York Times, May 30, 2006.
2 Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, New York: Hyperion, 2009.
3 Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
4 Controversy rages on about the size of the “college bonus”: for a recent, skeptical overview, see Mary Pilon, “What’s a Degree Really Worth?”, Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2010.
5 Michael Spence’s famous paper on this subject is “Job Market Signaling,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 87, no. 3, 1973: 355–74.
6 See Derek Neal, “The Complexity of Job Mobility among Young Men,” Journal of Labor Economics, vol. 17, issue 2, April 1999: 237–61. For more detail on “delayed adulthood,” see the website of the Network on Transitions to Adulthood, based at the University of Pennsylvania: transad.pop.upenn.edu/. See also Tony Doukopil, “Why I Am Leaving Guyland,” Newsweek, September 8, 2008 and Don Peck “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America,” Atlantic Monthly, March 2010.
7 Bibi S. Watson, “The Intern Turnaround,” Management Review, 9–12, June 1995.
8 Dustin Walsh, “Internships on Front Lines in Fight to Keep College Grads in Michigan,” Crain’s Detroit, June 6, 2010.
9 The 21 percent drop in mostly paid internships was registered by NACE in March 2009. See their press release, “Internship Hiring Falls 21 Percent,” naceweb.org.
10 The global surge in higher education has been documented by the U.S. Department of Education, the Census Bureau, and UNESCO. See: chronicle.com/article/Chart-More-College-Students/48516/.
11 David Card’s major contributions to the minimum wage literature include “Do Minimum Wages Reduce Employment? A Case Study of California, 1987–89,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 46, October 1992; “Using Regional Variation in Wages to Measure the Effects of the Federal Minimum Wage,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 46, October 1992; and “Minimum Wages and the Teenage Labor Market: A Case Study of California, 1987–89,” Annual Proceedings of the Industrial Relations Research Association, December 1990. In addition, there are “A Re-analysis of the Effect of the New Jersey Minimum Wage with Representative Payroll Data,” American Economic Review 90, December 2000; “Time-Series Minimum Wage Studies: A Meta-Analysis,” American Economic Review 85, May 1995; “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” American Economic Review 84, September 1994—all three written with Alan Krueger. See also Barbara Kiviat, “Why Do People Care So Much about the Minimum Wage?”, Reuter’s, 20 October 2010. The estimate from EPI is in Laura Fitzpatrick, “A Brief History of the Minimum Wage,” Time, July 24, 2009.
12 Madeline Zavodny, “Why Minimum Wage Hikes May Not Reduce Employment,” Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Economic Review, Second Quarter 1998, pp. 18–28. The popularity of the minimum wage is discussed in Adam Cohen, “Could the Courts Outlaw the Minimum Wage?,” Time, October 20, 2010.
1 The comments by Menlo Provost James Kelly are in Sara Lipka, “Dream Internships and Dubious Academic Credit for Sale: $9,500,” July 18, 2008.
2 Don Peck, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America,” Atlantic Monthly, March 2010.
3 The $42,500 Vogue internship was widely reported. For a broader look at intern auctions in the U.S., see Sue Shellenbarger, “Do You Want an Internship? It’ll Cost You,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2009; for the U.K., see Harriet Meyer and Graham Snowdon, “What Price Work Experience,” Guardian, December 5, 2009.
4 The CEO of CharitzBuzz.com is quoted in Beth Harpaz, “Thank You, Mom and Dad, for Landing My Internship,” The Ledger, May 10, 2010.
1 These anecdotes are drawn from a reader comment in Greenhouse, “The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not”; Amita Parekh, “Invaluable experience has a price tag,” Daily Trojan, February 25, 2010; a reader comment to Oregon Public Broadcasting’s “Internships 101” segment; Liz Seasholtz, “Unpaid Internships: No Pay, No Gain,” Wetfeet.com, wetfeet.com/undergrad/internships/articles/unpaid-internships.aspx; and Julie Halpert, “Can You Afford to Be a Summer Intern?”, Newsweek, April 5, 2010.
2 Ben Yagoda, “Will Work for Academic Credit,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 21, 2008.
3 The full title of the Milburn Report is Unleashing Aspiration: The Final Report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, released in July 2009 and available at cabinetoffice.gov.uk/accessprofessions.
4 Daniel Brook, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, New York: Henry Holt, 2007.
5 David Graeber, “Army of Altruists: On the Alienated Right to Do Good,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2007.
6 Laura Vanderkam, “With Interns, You Get What You Pay For,” USA Today, April 19, 2004.
7 To get more sense of the “Nachtwey Intern Ad Kerfuffle,” as one photographer blog called it, see the discussion at Jamie’s List: jamieslist.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/ the-james-natchwey-internship-follow-up-harrington-smith/.
8 For more on Spielberg and Lucas’s internships, see Jim Windolf, “Keys to the Kingdom,” Vanity Fair, February 2008. For Matt Singer’s horror stories, see Matt Singer, “Mr. Coffee,” Village Voice, January 3, 2006.
9 David Robb, “Commentary: Prod’n Assistants Need Pay,” Hollywood Reporter, April 7, 2010.
10 Jennifer 8. Lee, “Crucial Unpaid Internships Increasingly Separate Haves from the Have-Nots,” The New York Times, August 10, 2004.
11 Adelle Waldman, “Intern or Die,” New Republic, June 25, 2008, tnr.com/article/politics/intern-or-die.
12 David W. Chen and Michael Barbaro, “To Get an Internship at City Hall, It’s Not Always What You Know,” New York Times, July 19, 2010.
1 Jethro Mullen, “Interns in French Firms Stage Protest,” New York Times, November 24, 2005. Tommie Ullman, “135,000 unemployed Swedes will be offered internships,” Stockholm News, February 26, 2010. “Youth Ministry to Launch Internship Programme,” Nation (Pakistan), April 8, 2009. Ha Jung-yun, “The Internship Illusion,” The Yonsei Annals, August 9, 2010. Caroline Milburn, “Push for Intern Scheme,” The Age (Australia) April 26, 2010. Luke Harding, “A Merry Band,” Guardian, May 17, 2006. For more on the Infosys program, visit the official InStep site: infosys.com/InStepWeb/default.asp.
2 “The Intern Trap—Graduate Job Seekers Cheated and Exploited by Employers,” China Labour Bulletin, January 26, 2010, china-labour.org.hk/en/node/100662.
3 Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, New York: NYU Press, 2009.
4 On Foxconn’s internship, see Hu Yinan, “Students ‘Forced’ to Work at Foxconn,” China Daily, June 26, 2010, as well as Liu Linlin, “Foxconn ‘Abuses, Kidnaps’ Interns: Universities’ report,” Epoch Times, October 9, 2010, and Kathleen McLaughlin, “Silicon Sweatshops: Foxconn Refutes Accusations,” Global Post, October 12, 2010.
5 See Marcello Tari and Ilaria Vanni, “On the Life and Deeds of San Precario, Patron Saint of Precarious Workers and Lives,” Fibreculture, vol. 5, December 1, 2005. More on the Chainworkers at chainworkers.org/faq.
6 The documentary is Charlotte Buchen and Singeli Agnew, “France: The Precarious Generation,” FRONTLINE/World, April 19, 2007; see pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2007/04/france_the_prec.html.
7 See Anonymous, “Labor Minister Scholz Wants to Help a Bit” [in German], Der Spiegel, March 18, 2008, spiegel.de/unispiegel/jobundberuf/0,1518,542233,00.html.
8 Merijn Oudenampsen and Gavin Sullivan, “Precarity and N/European Identity: An Interview with Alex Foti,” Metamute, October 5, 2004, metamute.org/en/Precarity-european-Identity-Alex-Foti-Chain Workers. See also Stevphen Shukaitis, “Whose Precarity Is It Anyway?,” December 29, 2006, precariousunderstanding.blogsome.com/ 2006/12/29/whose-precarity-is-it-anyway/#more-43, August 8, 2010.
1 See David Brooks, “The Organization Kid,” Atlantic, April 2001.
2 See Athena Merritt, “Phila. City Council OKs Tax Credit for Internships,” Philadelphia Business Journal, June 17, 2010. The legislation, which could come into effect as early as 2012, would allow businesses that hire interns and pay them at least $8 an hour to claim tax credits of up to 40 percent of the compensation paid.
3 See Thomas Fisher, “The Intern Trap: How the Profession Exploits Its Young,” Progressive Architecture, 1994, p. 69–73.
4 Rebecca Delaney, “About Those Unpaid Internships,” American Prospect, July 16, 2010.
5 Kathryn Anne Edwards and Alex Hertel-Fernandez, “Paving the Way Through Paid Internships: A Proposal to Expand Educational and Economic Opportunities for Low-Income College Students,” Demos and Economic Policy Institute, March 23, 2010.
6 The “Unfair Internships” blog is at unfairinternships.wordpress.com.