Students majoring in communication frequently work unpaid internships
At least 75 percent of students within the Scripps College of Communication complete an internship, and Scott Titsworth, dean of the college, believes those students should be paid.
“What I can say is that, philosophically, the college is much more interested in cultivating paid internships for students,” he said. “We think that our students do a level of work that is at a caliber to be paid. The work ends up being better on both sides in that equation.”
In an unpaid internship, a company must provide an intern with “classroom experience in a real world setting” rather than solely using the intern for his or her work, Titsworth said, citing the U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division fact sheet on the criteria for-profit organizations must meet. He said those criteria do not apply to non-profit organizations providing similar internships, which results in somewhat of a gray area.
Bernhard Debatin, director of studies in the journalism Honors Tutorial College program, said he sees a benefit to unpaid internships in classroom settings. However, he said many unpaid internships are unethical and interns can be exploited for their need to complete an internship as a requirement for graduation.
“If a lot of internships are unpaid, then only those who either already have money or those who are willing to go into deeper debts are able to do it,” he said. “You may end up with more people from the upper-middle class because they can afford to take unpaid internships, and on the other hand, people who come from poor or less well-off environments will struggle.”
Debatin said in the long run, that can have a detrimental effect on having a diverse workforce.
Chelsea Amato, a senior studying journalism, echoed Debatin’s sentiments on the ethics of unpaid internships.
“You are doing all of this work for them, and a lot of companies are learning that we need these internships to graduate, and they know that they can still get people applying for them even though they’re unpaid,” she said.
Amato had a paid social media internship with the Ohio Department of Public Safety offered exclusively through Scripps during the summer of 2014.
She said she didn’t apply for many unpaid internships, because she felt paying to live away from home while not receiving compensation for work was unfeasible.
Molly Cornish, a senior studying communication studies, participated in an unpaid internship with Rural Action, a non-profit Appalachian environmental group.
“Not only was I benefiting myself, but I was also benefiting the community,” she said, adding she only worked 15 hours a week and wasn’t performing “slave labor.”
But she would expect a wage if Rural Action was a large, for-profit company.
@Alisa_Warren
aw120713@ohio.edu
