More than half of college students who graduate have had one or more internships, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. From one-fourth to one-half of the internships for college students are unpaid. Unpaid internships exist in for-profit firms for students to gain entry into careers that receive many job applicants, such as in fashion, book and magazine publishing, art galleries, sports management, and film and television. Internships give college students an opportunity to gain valuable job skills that can lead to job offers after they graduate. According to U.S. Department of Labor regulations, when private-sector companies provide unpaid internships for college students, the internship is expected to benefit the intern and be similar to vocational training so that useful job skills are imparted to the intern. In practice, for-profit firms consider unpaid internships to be legitimate as long as the students receive academic credit for their work. This college-credit loophole has tempted some companies to pile on their interns a large amount of unskilled work.

Many students have reported that they have held internships that involved noneducational and menial work. It is not unusual for unpaid internships to involve some menial work; however, when most of the work consists of unskilled labor, the unpaid internship can be in violation of the law. In one such case, a student at an Ivy League university said she devoted most of her time during an unpaid internship at a magazine publisher packaging and shipping 20 or more apparel samples per day back to fashion houses that had provided them for fashion shoots. In another case, a children’s film company provided an unpaid internship to a New York University student who had hoped to work in animation at the film company. Instead, this student was told to work in the facilities department and was ordered to wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu.

It is true that some unpaid internships can provide useful job skills to college students that they can put on their resumes to attract an employer’s attention. However, as illustrated by the examples in this case, some unpaid internships end up being little more than a collection of routine tasks and do little to improve a student’s professional skill set. With the current high levels of U.S. and European youth unemployment, some companies are tempted to take advantage of unpaid internships as a low-cost source of exploitable labor.