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Unpaid Internships Lead To Lower-Paying Jobs, Study Finds (theguardian.com)
The Guardian reports:
Almost every graduate taking an unpaid internship can expect to be worse off three years later than if they had gone straight into work. That is the shock finding of the first survey of its kind of the career trajectories of tens of thousands of students over a six-year period. The study, conducted by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, reveals that, three-and-a-half years after graduating, former interns face a salary penalty of approximately £3,500, compared with those who went straight into paid work, and £1,500 compared with those who went into further study... The study also found that those who took internships were less likely to go on to professional or managerial roles or be satisfied with their career compared with those who had gone straight into work.
Slashdot reader BarbaraHudson warns unpaid internships are also "a possible indicator of a large oversupply of workers to jobs available and downward pressure on pay." Anyone else want to share thoughts about the current job market for professionals -- or your own horror stories about your first job after college?
Slashdot reader BarbaraHudson warns unpaid internships are also "a possible indicator of a large oversupply of workers to jobs available and downward pressure on pay." Anyone else want to share thoughts about the current job market for professionals -- or your own horror stories about your first job after college?
Seriously... I can't take any more of this constant bullshit. I wish all these fucking idiots would just start telling the truth about things and stop bullshitting.
Not sure about the UK, but in the States you use unpaid internships to help get into your 300 level courses. After 30 years of budget cuts schools don't have enough space for all the applicants in most majors (especially medical, and not just full medical doctor, think Nursing, pharmacist, physical therapist, etc, etc). Even a perfect GPA won't guarantee you a spot anymore. So you volunteer, do extracurricular stuff and finally internships. My kid got lucky and got what's more or less a paid one. But it's like winning the lottery what with the number of applicants.
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Alternatively .... it could be the ones who couldn't land paying gigs right away suck more than the ones who did go straight to work.
Shouldn't unpaid internships in a field be an indication of the saturation of the job market in addition to job prospects after graduation? We have highschool dropouts making $20+/hr where I live and companies still have a shortage of good workers. You can make a very good living working in those fields.
Even if you just use it as a stepping stone to another career. These people made the personal decision to go into a field that was saturated with people wanting to be in it and unpaid internships are a very easy filter.
Hell if you can pass a drug test and show up on time you can make pretty good money driving trucks right now. I wouldn't bank on that long term but it should be more than enough money to save some, take night courses at a community college and leverage it into another career.
..and you shouldn't squander it away by demonstrating that you're willing to provide it for free.
See also:
-Programming contests where the hosting corp gives $100K as a Grand Prize but retains rights to all of the contestants code (and doesn't even pay any FICA tax)
-The NCAA making billions off of 'student-athletes' with lucrative television contracts
I have never been an intern but I have worked at lower-paying jobs during a period where I was in transition and didn't expect to be there long. Just to keep from depleting savings during that time.
The problem is that in a job interview where they review your employment history they will consider your past pay to determine what to offer you. (We aren't going to bump you up 200%). They will actually pay more to another candidate with less skills but higher past earnings for the exact same position. It isn't necessarily logical but I always suspected I would have been better being unemployed than low-pay employed..
So I can imagine the same thing happens to unpaid interns.
A local college has offered my company students who must complete an internship to get their degrees (in software engineering). There is no requirement for payment as this is a requirement to graduate and we were told by the college the best the students could hope for was a letter of recommendation. We are unusual in that we are paying the students and are working through a contract with the college to take on paid interns - this is in line with our B-Corp certification and general company philosophy.
So, for the majority of students from this college (and others), who have unpaid internships in order to get the piece of paper saying that they graduated from the program, what does this mean for their future salary prospects?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
News flash: Students who can't get paid internships often later can't get the best-paying jobs, either. Correlation is not causation.
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
"This is That" is a statire news show:
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thisis...
Meet the man who went unpaid as an intern for 35 years
After being offered an unpaid position as CEO of his company, Bill Marshall has had enough and is blowing the whistle on unpaid internships.
"For 35 years they just kept telling me I was getting on the job experience ... now I know I was being taken advantage of." ....
How? He has difficulty passing legislation in his own country - never mind the one that the article was actually talking about (Guardian - British newspaper).
... that it were only The Grauniad that would pretend to be shocked that employees starting paid work later tend to earn less after a given time.
But sadly it's the entire Western mainstream media. When not peddling lies about Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela - well, foreigners in general - they resort to "shocking" stories like this.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
(Interviewer): Oh, I see on your Resume` that you are willing to work for free?
(Job Seeker): Well.. I Interned for free while in college..
(Interviewer): Indeed. I believe we have the perfect position for you at our company, how soon can you start?
i bet
You volunteer your services for free, and get a slap in the face in return. Well, if they don't want to pay, maybe you can get a direct job with your new experience at some other place that appreciates you?
No wai!?? Universities can't possibly be doing that, they are only there to teach us to think and enlighten us and spread knowledge.
They are definitely not a for-profit business using cult-like techniques to recruit their next victims.
Nope, not at all.
How is it a shock that someone with more experience makes more money?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If you have a low-demand skill, perhaps you are a Medieval History or Comparative French Literature major, you probably aren't getting paid for an internship, but you probably aren't going to be doing that for a living, either.
Among people with in-demand degrees: STEM, law, software, medicine, etc, people are usually paid for internships, and often paid well. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, etc, all pay quite well for engineering internships. Those people go on to have good, high paying careers.
If you want to be paid for your work, you should learn to do something that people want done.
Amazingly, jobs that people are willing to do for free do not pay as highly as other jobs.
Also in this study, people that get paying jobs 3.5 years later in their career have lower salaries than those with three more years of paid experience.
In summary, water is wet and things fall down.
Slashdot reader BarbaraHudson warns unpaid internships are also "a possible indicator of a large oversupply of workers to jobs available and downward pressure on pay."
There's an essentially infinite amount of useful work that desperately needs doing - everything from finding cures for more cancers (that requires relatively high levels of training) to patrolling our streets to keep them safe (that requires relatively lower levels of training). So, given that there's an effectively unlimited amount of real meaningful work that desperately needs doing, how can there ever be an "oversupply" of workers?
At the most simplistic theoretical level, if you assume diminishing returns on labor rather than economies of scale in terms of demand for labor and if you assume that people are infinitely greedy rather than simply working to meet their needs in terms of supply of labor - then you can get the supply and demand curves for labor to slope the right way and form a stable equilibrium. But, in that model there should, by definition, never be any unemployment - wages will fall or rise to a level where everyone who wants to work at that wage point has a job.
So why is their unemployment at all? And, more broadly, why are there some countries with a strong middle class where everyone who is willing to work an honest 9-5 can be confident of earning enough to a support a small family simply but comfortably - while other countries have massive inequality with a small mostly-hereditary ruling class lording it over everyone else who is trapped in desperate poverty no matter how hard they work?
There is a great danger in inferring causation here, as this was a survey and not an experiment (with people randomly assigned to either group). The article wrongly states there is causation at play- that going into an internship caused them to be paid less later, rather than a real possibility that those that couldn't get jobs (or well paying jobs) decided to go the intern route instead. And those that got accepted into well paying jobs took them. So the cause might well be that the lesser paid or non-existent jobs caused the internship rather than the reverse.
Getting people used to working for no money at all makes those very same people appreciate low wages more than people who demand fair pay?
Le shock!
You guys are getting paid?!
I tend to rant.
I understand that there are circumstances where you have to play ball, but as a general rule:
NEVER give a salary history.
None of their business.
If you must justify this position say "confidential to past employer".
If they can't 'get that' you probably don't want to work with* them anyway.
*As far as possible work With an employer -not For them. Work For yourself and for your chosen ones.
my kid got lucky and got a paid one, but she would have taken an unpaid one if she hadn't just to give her one more edge when it came time to select students.
What I'm saying is, kids aren't taking internships to make more money like they used to when I was a kid. They're taking them because college has become hyper competitive and if they don't have something besides a 4.0 they won't be allowed to proceed with their academic career. Basically, the study's implied conclusion (that kids make less money if they do an unpaid internship) is pointless. Kids aren't doing internships for more money after graduation. They're doing it out of desperation to get into their last 2 years of school. And yeah, that's kinda screwed up right there.
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Colleges rake it in. This is due to the amazing abundance of taxpayer-backed student loan money. Also, this is due to the widespread understanding that one must have a college degree in order to succeed in business and in life.
The very unfortunate net effect here is that our population is tremendously over-educated. Some degrees (like journalism, for example) churn out more graduates each year than there are job openings on the entire planet. These kids are being sold an utter fantasy and are facing lifelong debt, no realistic job prospects in their chosen field, and depression from their shattered dreams.
I imagine that once upon a time a college education really differentiated someone in the labor market, and opened the door to a higher economic class. This worked precisely because the majority of people could not afford it. Now that we have evened-out the playing field, the resultant oversupply of educated labor has made the value of such workers plummet. We respond to this problem by continuing to make it worse.
There are still some fields where one can be differentiated by true competence: any field where knowledge and education simply aren't enough to succeed; where one needs significantly above-average genetics behind their brain power in order to succeed. Education is still a necessary prerequisite, but education alone will not prepare a person to face the challenges. There, and only there, can students expect to find high paying work when they graduate.
But....most people can't do those jobs, and hate them anyway.
How is this a shock?
As someone in a field where interns get paid relatively well, I would say this seems obvious.
Doing a job for free, is basically saying that your skills are valued at 0.
Why the fuck would someone pay you a lot of money for that?
Just think. You start working at $0 per month, I start at $5000.
Next year you negotiate a raise of 10%, and so do I.
Now you are at $0, and I'm at $5500.
So you decide enough is enough and manage to get a huge raise of $2000.
I get another $500 raise and am now at $6000.
If you take an unpaid internship, any future employer knows that if push comes to shove, you will take it up the ass.
They will threaten you with "we'll just hire an unpaid intern to replace you", and you will say, okay, I don't need that much money.
it's not cheap to hire more teachers. You need more facilities, more resources. The kids can't pay enough to cover that cost. College is a _lot_ more expensive then folks believe. We've been hiding that cost with massive government subsidies. Those subsidies got pulled by Clinton & Bush Jr.
It's just like our roads. We've got the existing infrastructure that was paid for by the feds back in the day and it works, but it's not nearly enough and we're having real problems now because of it.
And you're right, it doesn't make sense. That's why it's a problem that's not being addressed let alone solved. It's hard to explain to people that a kid with a 3.8 GPA might be kicked out of school. It doesn't make any sense. You hear it and you don't believe it. So the problem exists but folks ignore it because they don't believe it's happening...
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the quality of the school she graduates from will determine her base salary, which will in turn determine how much she makes for pretty much the rest of her life. Raises are a percentage of your current pay and your next job will consider your current salary when bargaining.
It's amazing, and more than a little terrifying, how decisions you make as a dumb kid completely shape every aspect of your adult life...
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So, let's see... unpaid internships make you get paid less later on? Utter nonsense. If you are losing the competition for a paid job, you take an unpaid internship. Why did you lose the first competition? Because you are less attractive to the employer than others. Why did you get paid less later on? Because you are less attractive to the employer than others. Both are from the same cause, not one causes the other. Duh.
The federal regulations on them include provisions that the company receive "no immediate advantage" from the activities of the intern... in other words, they can't do real, profitable work for free.
Not that the law is actually enforced.
But if the company is willing to skirt employment law in order to get something for nothing, they are going to fuck you once you get hired there too.
Who woulda thunk it?
So... lie?
I'm not saying you should necessarily disclose your previous salaries, but lying in a job interview is not a good way to start a relationship with any company.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No, not if the industry she's in requires any competence. A good school might help get a foot in the door, but after that it's up to the individual's performance.
The finding is not a shock. If you work in an industry or for a company that relies on free or reduced price labor then it should come as no shock they wonâ(TM)t pay proper wages.
My paid internship came about because my roommate's work needed an extra QA tester but didn't have any money in the budget for a full time staff member. For six months I regressed 600+ old bugs, organized the storage closet, and wrote a 250-page manual. That started my technical career 20+ years ago.
From what I've seen, people going into unpaid internships are the lower quality students that couldn't find paying jobs. It makes sense that they don't progress as fast later.
The same thing occurred to me. The graduates may end up where they do for a reason. A thorough test would randomly place half the group into unpaid internships and the other half in paid positions. But that would short-circuit the interview process, and interview ability affects ones career in general (longer term).
For example, if you are a poor interviewer, you would be less likely to get a job out of school and have to settle for unpaid internships etc. But the process mentioned above would put poor interviewers into jobs they otherwise would NOT get.
Thus, it's difficult to devise an experiment to fully test a causation relationship. The only one I can think of right now is to yank some portion out of their newly acquired job and put them into unpaid internships. But neither the graduate nor the company would be happy with that. You'd have to mess with lives and commerce to get good studies.
Software engineering faces a similar problem: companies don't want to be guinea pigs for real software they depend on. Thus, very indirect causation models have to be created, which makes it a soft science.
For example, certain personalities may gravitate toward certain companies, project types, and/or languages. Thus, the project results may reflect staff skills and habit as much as or more so than the technology used, and therefore saying technology X is better than Y is dubious. You'd have to force employees into situations they may not otherwise want to get sufficient randomization.
Table-ized A.I.
So, people who get crappy unpaid internships tend to wind up in crappy lower-paying jobs later in life?
How much more "dog bites man"/"sun rises in the east"/"water is wet" can you get?
Correlation is not causation. Majority of paid internships prefer students from top-ranked universities, while unpaid internships take community/city/state college kids who won't get paid as much even after they graduate with a degree.
but she was recommended by the school, so I don't know what else to call it.
But who in their right mind takes an unpaid internship after graduation? That's not an internship, that's being taken advantage of by a weak job market. There's nothing worth studying there. It's a blight that needs to be stamped out. A way of having an employee without paying them, which at least in my country used to be very, very illegal.
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unless their for profit. My kid's going to a public university. The only admin folks making good money are the dean the football coach and the basketball coach. Everybody else makes jack. The professors make low six figures, but they're also tops in their fields. Most are there so they can get money to do the kinds of basic research that corporations won't fund because while both interesting & beneficial it doesn't pay off for decades.
College is just really, really expensive. It always has been, but we funded it with tax dollars taken mostly from the upper class. We did that because post WWII folks felt they were owed a good life with an education. People seem to have lost sight of that. Or if they think they're owed something they think it's just them that's owed it and that everybody else should just pay for it themselves.
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kids can only borrow so much money. If you raise the cost of class you don't get more students, you just switch from a system where the top students get to go to school (merit) to one where money decides who gets to go. You haven't actually solved the problem and you've debatably made it worse (some argue that money should decide everything in civilization).
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Fuck you, fish tits!!
> former interns face a salary penalty of approximately £3,500, compared with those who went straight into paid work
Now compare salaries between former interns, and those who remained unemployed because they never got the market exposure through an internship.
That's a fairer comparison to me.
I don't understand why this is shocking.
These people end up taking unpaid internships because its their last hope to get in the industry. As a student, you should actively be trying to figure out how you can apply the things you've learned to real world issues. Employers pick up on the students that ask questions about real issues during visits, networking events, what-have-you, not the ones who ask if the company has an employee lounge with nice comfy chairs for break time.
I'm sure there are the unfortunate cases, but from observation (I live in Canada, maybe the rest of the world has it differently, I don't know) it tends to be the less skilled/lazy folks who get the unpaid internships. Those who end up doing something about their pitfalls during these unpaid internships should have earned their place in the industry, and will soon be getting theirs, because they've shown that they care. Employers love that. Anyone else should just go back to school, or flip some burgers.
I tend to rant.
Like most people who turn up for interviews (except for those who have been made redundant, or former contractors), those who do unpaid internships are generally lacking the skills to be useful. If they had skills, someone would employ them - perhaps not doing exactly what they want, but it would still be more relevant than being a slave.
Any employee that is dumb enough to work for free would also tend to be the one that a potential employer could slaughter in a job interview. I doubt that many of the top students in computer training in universities go for intern positions. I see it as a sort of admission that the potential employee is not strong enough in their standing in college. If one can do it it is far better to have potential employers begging to hire you at top dollar. Being first in class at a major university is not easy.
I've been gainfully employed for almost 40 years. Right out of college. If I'm not worth paying for my labor, then it's not worth working for a company.
Who takes an unpaid internship AFTER they've graduated? Slackers who haven't worked hard enough while in school, or people who are underselling themselves and don't understand their true value.
Both groups are likely not to be the people self-advocating for raises and actively competing for promotions.
or being lied to. Not sure which. See here. Took me a few seconds on google to find that. The sad thing is you managed to get modded up.
Cutting student loan funding isn't to solution. All that does is force poor kids completely out of college. Like it was before we started funding higher education with tax dollars post WWII.
If you're just being lied to please educate yourself on google. If you're actively lying then, well, fuck off you right wing revisionist. Right back at you.
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the banks are raking it in with the loans and the schools have no need to cut the price.
Well, yes, the population of people who are forced to take unpaid internships is less skilled and has fewer choices than those who have the option of taking a paid job right away.
No, it's just an indicator of a large oversupply of people with useless degrees, the result of government subsidies of such useless degrees.
and I'm tired of hearing folks blather on about it in those terms. This is how it works:
Businesses, schools and other organizations are not allowed to discriminate on the bases of race or gender. They must keep track of the race and gender of applicants and the reasons why they choose a given applicant. If the percentage of a given race or gender in their organization is less than the percentage in the local community they must surrender their records in order to show they are not making racially or gender motivated hiring or admitting decisions (which most have long since decided should not be legal, you can disagree if you want, but be aware that if you do you are a racist. I'm not insulting you, I'm stating a fact).
There are no quotas. You can hire 100% white males if you want. You just have to have paperwork that proves you did it because they were the most qualified applicants. You have not nor have you ever been passed over for a black woman (or any other combination of minority) because of Affirmative Action.
I don't bring this up because I'm some starry eyed SJW. I'm upset you're blaming your economic situation on Affirmative Action quotas instead of the real culprit: declining middle class job opportunities caused by lower pay and outsourcing; all of which was orchestrated by wealthy plutocrats to your detriment and mine. Affirmative Action is one of the many distractions they use to divide the working class against itself. We can't start solving our problems for real until we face up to that.
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there's not enough funding to run a big enough program for all the qualified applicants. They could raise tuition but that wouldn't really help. College is already at the limits of affordability even accounting for the loans. Raising prices would just mean fewer students could afford to enter. So all that does is change the system from one where only the top kids get to finish school (merit based) to one where only the well to do kids get to finish.
Basically, this isn't a problem we can solve with supply/demand economics. The only way for any of this to work is for the government to step in and fund public Universities, which is what they did for about 40 years Post WWII until Regan, Clinton & the Bushes (and the State legislatures) started slashing funding
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More and more education requires a vocational unit: If one is studying because one doesn't have a job, this means one needs a job to get the certificate, in addition to the age-old phrase of "need a job to get the job (experience)". Thus students are forced to into unpaid work for a brief time.
What is the benefit of doing charity work for a profitable business? Graduates will do anything to get experience in the industry and employers are limited by laws and unions from turning graduates into slaves. The graduates themselves should see the time they spend sharpening pencils and renumbering documents is a pointless skill. Such people have already decided to eat from the floor, hoping their master will throw a juicy morsel under the table.
It actually goes back to the 60s and 70s - Saint Ronald, the first of his name, was peeved at all them hippies getting educated at public expense and started cutting the UC budget. By the 80s, the die was cast.
In most parts of Europe and the US, it is very rare for unpaid internships in engineering fields. But it is standard practice in other fields, such as journalism. But it's not really fair to compare the salaries of engineers to journalists. The capabilities of an engineer to create value for an employer is simply much higher than it is for a journalist. It's why many of us go to engineering school and work harder than the art students. We don't do this for some self satisfaction or to contribute to society, but because we plan on getting paid.
they come from private for profit schools that rose up as blue collar work disappeared due to outsourcing and people who couldn't hack college found themselves without opportunities and desperately trying to get ahead. They did indeed take advantage of cheap, guaranteed government loans. The public universities are non-profit. They have no revenues per se.
You know all this. You know exactly what the problem is, which is that we abandoned the working class so the rich could have tax cuts. Are you one of their lackeys or do you just enjoy trolling? You've got the talking points down too well to just be some random yahoo. Either way you should be ashamed of yourself. You and your ilk bring down all of civilization out of fear, anger and hatred. Does it feel good? Is it worth it?
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I HATE HR like most of us. First off I think this study is full a crap.
HR wants:
1. Experience only at work (not at school or as a hobby) as Taleo or talent acquisition software will delete it off their shitty ATS application software where your application is deleted if you do not have this
2. In interviews again experience only in work in an office or you == McDonalds worker in terms of knowledge for the job. It is impossible to learn at home or a university where we are exposed to PC troubleshooting in Computer Science degrees (sarcasm meter on last sentence)
3. No gaps in related work field as this means you must have been fired and a trouble maker
4. No references is dead water as it means you are a bad employee then as you are hiding something.
An internship or some useless job in an office that pays little is the only way you can get past HR and the Taleo system that filters out applicants. How else are you going to get that reference, close the gap, and gain experience you can use for bullet points in SEO that recruiters use?
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But Trump says that he has had a tremendous success. Second only, maybe, to Lincoln, in Presidentialness. Trump is the handsomest, bravest, toughest and smartest guy to ever grace the White House with his presence. Just ask him, he will tell you how great this Trump guy is.
Why do they require unpaid "externships" in most medical fields? As a lot of those are for licensing or academic purposes those folks are paying to work. In IT getting paid is pretty standard for good internships so not sure why it's ok in the medical fields.
The quality of these interns barely justifies a paycheck in the first place
This is not strictly about internship but somewhat runs parallel
When I was in college I used to volunteer at the Salvation Army's halfway house for the homeless, until one night, one of the workers told me, in a very nice way, that the more volunteers Salvation Army got, the less workers they need to hire
According to that person, most of the 'workers' working in the homeless centers are themselves homeless - for them, a job is a job, but for the volunteers, most probably 'jobs' are not on their top priority list
Those accepting unpaid internships are not greedy enough to find higher paying jobs
After Brexit the plan is to annex the UK and convert it into 4 new states -Ireland, Wales, England, Scotland.
Not entirely true. There are some positions such as investment banking, white shoe management consulting and corporate law firm jobs that are very sensitive to the school you go to. People like me who went to state schools just don't get these opportunities.
As an example...a graduate from Big State U with good grades will likely be able to get an entry level position at a mid-range consulting company like Accenture or KPMG, because those firms live and die on the number of cheap, non-offshore "requirements gatherers" and "PowerPoint deliverers" that they can fly to customer sites 50 weeks out of the year. They will most likely not be able to get a job with McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company or the other high-end fancy consulting firms. These companies almost exclusively hire from the Ivy League schools or require things like military connections, and these positions almost always lead to extremely lucrative careers because you're basically setting yourself up to be on a huge customer's executive ranks when you're done living in hotels and airports. Ir's a closed club and they don't really care _how_ you got to an Ivy League school, but they do care if you graduated from one because they have a lot of high-end customers to impress.
There are some fields where it's just expected that you'll work either a completely unpaid or minimum-wage internship. Living in the NYC area, I see it all the time...publishers, media companies, fashion design houses and advertising firms consider it a new graduate's foot-in-the-door opportunity. There are plenty of stories of essentially unpaid interns doing a staff's bidding and putting in massive amounts of hours because everyone else is willing to do the same thing. If new grads could pay these companies for the opportunity, they would...it's the (unpaid) equivalent of programmers being willing to be abused by video game companies just to have the opportunity to work in video games...if you don't want to do your 10th consecutive 120 hour work week, there are 200 others willing to do it.
Anywhere else, it's a scam...interns should expect at least a small amount of money that isn't minimum wage and also expect to actually learn something on the job. Unpaid interns basically run errands and get coffee, but engineering interns usually get at least some of the grunt work associated with a project. That's actually a good way to learn whether you like the field enough to stick it through the grunt work years. I did plenty of grunt work IT jobs in the beginning of my career and put up with it because I knew I'd be doing something more interesting later.
turn down for BUTT!
#MAGA
i'll give you a dollar if you smoke my donger
sniff my stinky spot!
I work for a medical device developer in San Diego and we interview interns from all over the country and the world as a whole. We are very selective about who we want to bring in as an intern because even though we know many of them don't have the skills yet, our company is a training ground to give them those skills. They will learn things here that no other company would dare teach an intern and in doing so they will be heads and shoulders beyond their classmates when they return. We also pay our interns. We pay them entry level engineering salaries for the time they are here. What they get from being an intern here, they will get nowhere else. They are thrust with levels of responsibilities that entry level post graduate engineers get and they thrive because of it. We've built a very good winning formula for our company as a whole and it's paying off very well for us.
eat turds and die like the butch that you are
Unpaid internships are a sign of an oversubscribed field. This is the job market saying, "we don't have to pay you, we have ample applicants and can pick the very best ones at any time. We will deign to provide you a job only if you are willing to work for free!"
Which isn't of course the definition of a job, doing stuff for free is the definition of a hobby.
And unfortunately there are lots of willing suckers, people who believe that they are destined for one and only one career in life. Now this study suggests that the willing suckers will continue to be taken advantage of, years after leaving their internship. Big surprise, they signaled their willingness to be taken advantage of from the start.
Get a paid internship if that's what it takes. Getting paid for your labour is a sign of respect; the employer gets something and the intern gets something. Start demanding this respect right from the beginning because people won't suddenly start respecting you, after they started your working relationship disrespecting you.