When you can't afford to work for free

Liz Curtis was in over her head. She had just completed her first year at Northwestern and was working her first-ever internship at nonprofit Sigma Beta Xi in her hometown of Riverside, California. Though Curtis, a social policy major, had barely finished her first year of college, she found herself spearheading a complete overhaul of Sigma Beta Xi’s youth program with next to no oversight – despite being unpaid and part-time.

When Curtis asked her boss what the uniforms for the new program should look like, he responded, “well, that’s up to you.” Actually, this was his response to every question she asked regarding the project.

“He just completely absolved himself of any responsibility of working out the finer details and the technicalities of this program,” Curtis says.

Curtis was the sole person assigned to work on Rites of Passage, Sigma Beta Xi’s youth development program that helps Black youth transition from childhood to adulthood. It was being transformed from a one-year program for boys to a seven-year program for both boys and girls, and the goal was to implement it in schools. The workload was stressful, with Curtis juggling tasks like researching the Boy Scout model, developing a curriculum and putting together a presentation on the program to show the board for approval. Often, she ended up taking work home with her. Other times, she was asked to do work outside the scope of her role as an intern,like making sure the project didn’t infringe on copyright law.

“I’m not a copyright attorney,” Curtis says. “I’m 19 years old. I was really getting stressed out trying to do all this work, and my family was like, ‘Liz, don’t get stressed out, they’re not even paying you.’”

Curtis outlined the seven-year program with defined goals, Boy Scout- style symbols and definitions for each stage. At the end of the summer, she Curtis’s unpaid internship experience left her feeling exploited, and she’s not alone. For college students, unpaid internships are often a necessary evil; they provide contacts, relevant work experience and, sometimes, even jobs. For the 66 percent of Northwestern students who come from the top 20 percent of household income, this may not be a problem. But low-income students are left with a difficult choice: take an internship they can’t afford, or sacrifice a valuable experience to make money they need.

The persistence of the unpaid internship

Internships have boomed in recent decades, with the share of college graduates who work as interns rising from less than 10 percent in the mid- 1980s to over 80 percent in the mid- 2000s, according to a report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. There are over a million people working as interns in the United States at any one time, and Ross Perlin, author of “Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy,” estimates that about half of those interns are unpaid. Northwestern Career Advancement’s post-graduation survey corroborates those estimates, nding that, of the 76 percent of 2015 graduates who had participated in at least one internship while at Northwestern, 49 percent had worked at least one unpaid internship.

Not only is the tendency toward unpaid internships over blue-collar or service jobs a generational thing, “it’s an affluent, generational thing,” says Susan Provenzano, a Pritzker School of Law professor who teaches employment law and employment discrimination courses. “Parents who are affluent have been successful in their industries, and they encourage their kids to do the same thing. I do think that they see it as an investment. They see it as a way to network, as a way to develop a keen understanding of the day-to-day, ins- and-outs of that kind of job.”

This boom experienced a hiccup in 2013 when a judge ruled in favor of two unpaid interns in a high- profile class action lawsuit against Fox Searchlight Pictures. The interns successfully sought pay and damages for their work on the film “Black Swan,” and a wave of similar suits followed from those who felt their unpaid internships violated the U.S. Department of Labor’s Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Some companies decided to pay interns to avoid a similar fate, and others shut down their programs entirely after they were forced to settle.

But unpaid internships may be making a comeback. Fox Searchlight Pictures appealed, and the 2nd Circuit Court overturned the decision in 2015, ruling that the Labor Department’s interpretation of who counted as an intern under FLSA was unreasonably narrow. In January, the rigid six-part test was replaced by a more flexible metric: the “primary beneficiary test.” The test has seven factors, but failure to meet one of them is not disqualifying, as each case is evaluated on its own merits. This change allows companies to more easily avoid compensating interns and makes it di cult for interns to bring class action suits against firms.

“Given employers general reticence to anything that looks like a higher minimum wage ... It would be very unlikely that you’d see these positions continue if they were required to be paid at a minimum wage level,” Provenzano says.

Summer internships & SIGP

In total, Curtis worked four jobs this summer. On top of interning Monday to Thursday at Sigma Beta Xi, she racked up more hours on Fridays interning at the University of California Riverside’s Robert Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies in order to meet the 250-hour minimum requirement for the Summer Internship Grant Program (SIGP). Curtis made money on the side by working for her mother, a consultant, and babysitting her niece.

Staying home for the summer wasn’t ideal, but Curtis’s plan to stay in Evanston and find a local SIGP- compliant internship hadn’t panned out.

“In order to sublet an apartment, I would’ve had to have my parents front that rst month’s rent, which would not have been possible,” Curtis says. “I went home so I wouldn’t have to pay for somewhere to live and so I’d be able to make money at the same time.”

When she arrived on campus this fall, her summer savings went toward school expenses like books and dorm supplies, and she returned to her work-study job at NUIT.

For low-income students at Northwestern, juggling jobs and internships while trying to save for the school year is commonplace.There are resources on campus dedicated to leveling the financial playing field, including SIGP, the grant Curtis received. Last year, to o set the burden of unpaid internships, the program awarded selected applicants $3000 (or $6000 for some international internships through the Buffett Institute). This upcoming year, the Buffet Institute decided not to move forward with this grant, so SIGP will only be awarding $3000 per recipient.

“Not every student is able to not make money over the summer,” SIGP coordinator Eleni Vartelas says. “SIGP was created so that it can take care of the living expenses for students so that they can take the time to really focus on that internship and not worry about doing a second or third job.”

While SIGP’s $3000 may be enough for some, low-income students like Curtis end up working overtime to make ends meet. When it was founded in 2007, SIGP awarded 10 applicants out of 90. The number has grown exponentially since, with 449 out of 800 awarded last summer.

“If we could fund every single student, we would do it,” Vartelas says. “We just don’t have the funding to.”

Typically, funding from the University remains the same or increases each year, but donations to SIGP fluctuate. Due to limited resources, the program must prioritize some applicants over others. The selection committee does this by scoring applications based on a rubric. It looks at both financial circumstances and quality of application, including a demonstration of the internship’s relevance to a student’s studies or extracurricular activities and how the experience will lead to the development of career goals.

“We take a look at financial need and what students have going on,” Vartelas says. “Every year, we have a needier and needier class.”

This year is no different. In an annual welcome back email, President Morton Schapiro touted the unprecedented socioeconomic diversity of the incoming class of 2022, which is 13.5 percent first- generation and 20 percent Pell Grant eligible. Although they got in the door, they won’t necessarily have access to the same opportunities as wealthier students like economics junior Kedar Satyanand.

“I’d say about 70 percent of my [summer] expenses were covered by my parents helping me out,” Satyanand says.

Last summer, he sublet an apartment in Evanston and commuted to his unpaid internship at NextGen Growth Partners, a private equity firm in Chicago. Satyanand, an international student from New Delhi, India, characterizes his socioeconomic status as “definitely well-off.”

“I’m not on a scholarship, not taking out any loans to be here,” Satyanand says. “My education is completely funded by my parents’ savings and income. [We’re] definitely up there in terms of wealth and household income.”

Though Satyanand applied for SIGP, he soon began to feel uneasy about taking resources from students who were less financially privileged. “I realized that I didn’t need the money from SIGP for what I wanted to do, and I decided to withdraw my application,” he says.

JR & Practicum

Unpaid internships carry a heavier financial burden for some, but students can opt to work paying jobs instead. However, some schools require internships for students to graduate, like Medill’s journalism residency (JR) and SESP’s practicum.

JR, originally called Teaching Newspaper, began in 1972 as an optional program and was made compulsory in the 1980s. In 2013, a ProPublica article criticized Medill for offering “internships with prestige, but no paycheck.” According to the article, JR sites paid Medill $1250 per intern, but interns only received a stipend of $600 to $1200 from the school.

While Medill has made strides since then to make sure interns are compensated, “there are some JR sites – nonprofits, documentary lawmakers – which simply can’t a ord to do so,” according to Interim Dean Charles Whitaker. Sites that can’t pay students an hourly wage, or choose not to, must provide a $1250 stipend. For a student working full time for 11 weeks, that amounts to $2.84 an hour. Meanwhile, students are still required to pay tuition during their JR quarter to receive academic credit.

“It’s universally understood that the federal minimum wage is not a living wage, and that’s signi cantly less than the federal minimum wage,” Medill graduate Louisa Wyatt says. “You pay for two months of rent, and the stipend is gone.”

This is doubly the case in big cities like New York, Los Angeles and D.C., where many prestigious publications and media opportunities are located. The cost of living can be inhibitive, causing some JR students to opt for their second or third-choice internship so they can stay local. According to Whitaker, students who can’t or don’t want to do JR during the academic year can substitute in an outside internship to fulfill the JR requirement or take four additional journalism classes on campus.

Wyatt, who graduated last spring, received the stipend when she interned for Imagination Publishing, a Chicago- based content marketing firm, in the fall of her senior year.

“When you’re low-income and you have JR, you don’t even think about going anywhere else because of how expensive it is,” Wyatt says. “New York was never even an option.”

Wyatt continued to live in Evanston and took the Metra to her JR site Monday to Friday. Commuting was her biggest expense even though she saved $190 by purchasing the reduced-rate student monthly pass, which is technically only for students high school-aged or younger. Three monthly passes at full fare would have set her back $480 – more than a third of her stipend.

“There were a couple times where I got caught and they asked, ‘Can I see your student ID?’ and I would show my Northwestern one,” Wyatt says. “I would play dumb and be like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know.’”

Because Wyatt was interning full time, she had to temporarily give up her work-study job at Norris Cashier’s Office, where she was a student supervisor. Though Wyatt didn’t apply for it, Medill’s Ben Baldwin Fund offers assistance to some students with demonstrated financial need; other scholarships are offered for students pursuing a fashion, video or broadcast JR. She was still able to cover her expenses, though, because she received a $3500 financial aid refund per quarter on top of the stipend.

“If the vast majority of the students are able to afford JR and do whatever the fuck they want, [Medill] may not be as concerned about it,” Wyatt says. “My attitude and the attitude of my friends was kind of like, ‘Oh, this is kind of a shitty thing we have to do.’ But none of us really ever made more noise about it than just complaining to each other.”

Similarly, all SESP students are required to complete a junior year practicum where they work in their field of study by interning 30 hours a week and attending a related seminar. Like Medill, SESP doesn’t require employers to pay interns an hourly wage. And, because they’re usually at schools, nonprofits and governmental organizations, most don’t. Unlike Medill, though, SESP doesn’t require a stipend.

“There are some paid opportunities, but they’re opportunities that I’m not interested in, so I didn’t bother applying to them,” says Samantha Buresch, a senior studying learning and organizational change.

Buresch interned at Evanston Township High School last winter, taking the 93 bus from her sorority house and back Monday through Thursday. After the Friday seminar, she squeezed in five hours at her work-study job at the SESP office in Annenberg, half of the hours she’d normally work. SESP’s Ventra Fund, a scholarship for students with demonstrated financial need, covered Buresch’s transportation costs and reimbursed her for the background check ETHS required.

During the academic year, internships take place in the Chicagoland area. However, students who complete practicum in the summer before or after their junior year have the option of going to San Francisco or Washington, D.C.

“In theory it’s a good idea to give students hands-on experience,” Buresch says. “But at the same time, it does kind of perpetuate a cycle of college inequality in a sense, in that students with money are able to do it in the summer and have the opportunity to do it in San Francisco or Washington, D.C. Yes, students may be able to get paid during that time, but you’re also paying [tuition] for course credit, so are you really making money?”

Engage Chicago & Chicago Field Studies

Initially, Curtis wanted to participate in Engage Chicago, Northwestern’s summer program centered eight-week course and an internship at a government institution, social enterprise or nonprofit. However, the internship component is unpaid, and working another job simultaneously is di cult given the program’s Monday to Friday schedule. Without aid, registration, tuition and housing cost $9,726.

Chicago Field Studies, a similar program, sets students up with an internship at a Chicago firm along with a related weekly seminar. Unlike Engage Chicago, though, it’s offered every quarter and allows internships in all fields. According to the CFS website, most internships are unpaid, but students with demonstrated financial need are eligible for additional aid in the form of a stipend.

“I think I just had given in to the fact that, if this was the eld that I was going to get an internship in, it wasn’t going to be paid,”says Rachel Silverstein, a Weinberg senior studying psychology and legal studies.

Silverstein is taking the civic engagement seminar for two credits to complement her internship at immigration law firm Davidson & Seseri LLC, where she works Monday to Wednesday. Because Silverstein only needs two more credits to graduate, she’s not taking any additional courses this quarter, but students taking fewer than four CFS credits often do.

“It’s not an internship where I copy things and get coffee,” Silverstein says. “I do everything from drafting affidavits, which are clients’ statements as to why they should remain in the United States. I prepare the application packages, so I put together evidence of documentation, and I write cover letters for the application to actually be sent in. Especially for people who are looking for asylum, I research country conditions in their country of origin to show why they couldn’t return.”

Despite doing substantive and necessary work, Silverstein doesn’t get paid hourly, though the law rm does provide a $200 monthly travel stipend. On the side, she works seven hours a week at Alumni Relations and Development’s Phonathon.

“It’s hard to justify doing work and not being paid for it,” Silverstein says. “It’s also especially annoying that a lot of unpaid internships are in legal fields or public interest fields, nonprofits, places where people who want to make a difference are trying to work. It’s discouraging sometimes to feel like you’re trying to do some good, but you’re not getting paid for it.”

Silverstein encountered the same problem last summer when she worked as an unpaid intern for Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability. She knew it was unlikely she’d get SIGP since she’s not on financial aid, but applied anyway, thinking she “might as well try and see what happens.” When Silverstein didn’t get the grant, she went ahead with the internship, opting to pick up shifts at Henry Crown Sports Pavilion on top of her usual Phonathon hours to make it work.

“Places like the City of Chicago just truly, really are not able to pay interns,” Silverstein says. “It’s annoying, but I’m just lucky to be privileged enough to be able to actually do it.”

Next summer, Curtis hopes to participate in the Global Engagement Summer Institute, a Northwestern- affiliated service learning study-abroad program worth two credits. While it’s $8,707, there are a number of GESI-sponsored and outside scholarships, some of which cover the full cost of participation. Otherwise, Curtis will apply to SIGP again and save up for the first month’s rent in order to stay in Evanston this time around.

No matter what form they take, unpaid internships present an obstacle for low-income students at Northwestern. While aspiring to diversity is an admirable pursuit, a diverse student body means little if students are still barred from certain experiences because of a price tag. Given the recent deregulation of internships, Provenzano says the responsibility to make them accessible now falls to universities.

“I think it’s going to be up to these educational institutions to make it easier, either by reducing tuition or o ering stipends,” she says. “To me, that’s the only solution that really makes sense because if you are not independently able to bear this cost, I don’t know how you find a benefactor.”