The Times' Silly Article on "Elusive" Internships

In a couple of blog posts this spring, I commented favorably on the Obama Labor Department’s decision to crack down on employers who abuse their college-age interns—essentially using them as replacements for regular employees, minus the pay. Far from saying “you can’t have unpaid interns, that it’s exploitation,” as John Stossel put it, the regulations simply require that internships serve their original intended function, which is to provide training and experience in a particular field.
That is, if an unpaid internship is more like an apprenticeship than a job that happens to be unpaid, then it’s okay. But if you’re assigned to the facilities department to “wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu,” as one aspiring animator profiled by the New York Times in April had been, that’s not okay. That’s taking a job away from a janitor, that’s mistreating an intern who thought she was going to learn something, that’s exploiting the fact that most interns won’t complain about doing grunt work because they’re so desperate to have seemingly impressive experiences on their résumés.
This weekend, the Times followed up on this subject, announcing that “Students Chafe Under Internship Guidelines” and that summer internships had become “elusive.”
It was a very silly article.
The thesis: “many students have had a tougher time than they anticipated in landing résumé-enhancing experience this summer.”
The proof: ehh… not so much.
Let’s check out each of these “tales of frustration,” as the Times describes them. But first, let’s note that the thesis, even if true, wouldn’t prove a causal relationship between the Labor Department’s regulations and the experiences of these students. In any case, on to the anecdotes:
1. A “junior at Penn State had his paid corporate internship offer revoked during the last week of classes this spring.”
— A sad story indeed. Oh, wait, we find out later that he found “a six-week paid position at another firm.” And this must have been in late spring, by which point most spots are filled up. Still, with all that working against him, in the midst of this supposed internship drought, he found an internship, and a paid one at that.
2. “A journalism student in Washington had to walk away from three internship opportunities because she wouldn’t receive academic credit.”
—That’s unfortunate, though it would seem to be the fault of her stingy school, not regulation-fearing employers. What’s more, “She ended up finding a part-time paid internship, but it’s not in journalism; it’s a post at the federal Food and Drug Administration.” The way this punchline is set up, the author clearly wants us to pity the student. Alas, somehow an article that set out to prove that employers wouldn’t even offer unpaid internships is instead proving that paid internships abound.
3. “Emily Lennox, a 25-year-old M.B.A. candidate at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said the academic credit requirement hadn’t arisen last summer when she took an unpaid internship at a venture capital firm, a position she said provided a valuable “quick immersion” into the business world. “This year it was more difficult,” she said. She finally found two part-time unpaid internships, though she said she has since quit one out of dissatisfaction. But, she added, she is learning a lot in the other — a 15-hour-a-week stint at a start-up retail firm.”
— First, contrary to the author’s implication, the unpaid venture capital internship, if it were truly so “valuable,” would probably not alarm the Labor Department. Second, this woman found not one but two internships. One of them happened to be lousy, so she quit. Good for her. But if that internship really was so lousy, why would we bemoan its possible disappearance? And wouldn’t we want to require this employer to actually teach its interns something?
4. “Sarah Green, a 20-year-old art history major at Emory University, landed a prestigious internship last summer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year she hoped to return to the New York art world. She applied to every auction house and museum she could find for both paid and unpaid spots. Every place turned her down, with some explaining they’d cut back on the number of interns they now hire. The experience may have been a career-changer for Ms. Green. “I took this as a sign that I was not meant to work in the fine arts,” she said. Instead she enrolled in summer courses in graphic design and advertising and has now decided to apply to a graduate program in art direction for advertising.”
— How resourceful of her. A sob story this is not. But it comes pretty close to supporting the author’s thesis: “some” employers explained that they’d “cut back.” Of course, that could just be a line they feed to disappointed applicants. Anyway, it sounds like Sarah had some rotten luck, but the Times could have just as easily interviewed the people who got the internships she applied for. Without any statistical evidence that the number of internships offered this year is lower than in previous years, there’s no reason to cherry-pick her story over anyone else’s.
5. “Kathryn Ciano, a law student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., who aspires to become a legal journalist, worked through a group called the Institute for Humane Studies, which helped place her in an unpaid internship at Fox Business News in New York and awarded her a $3,200 stipend. But Fox still required her to obtain a letter showing she was receiving academic credit for the work. Her law school wouldn’t grant credit for a journalism internship, however. So she found a community college in Los Angeles that would award her credit and furnish the required letter for $200 — much less than she would have had to pay George Mason.
Ms. Ciano’s internship sounds like the type of post the new rules might call into question — 40 to 50 hours a week working on the development of a new show. But Ms. Ciano said the hands-on experience has been terrific. “It’s really wonderful,” she said. “They’re really nurturing, great mentors.””
— Again, if the internship is really so “wonderful” and “nurturing,” then no, it would not be called into question by the Labor Department’s rules. The point of the regulations is to make sure that unpaid internships are “hands-on” and “terrific.” The author of this article should have gone back and read the Times’ April piece: packaging and shipping apparel samples, making coffee and sweeping bathrooms, photocopying and filing—now those actually sound like the type of internships the new rules might call into question.
So, we have five detailed anecdotes, none of which is particularly compelling or tear-jerking, several of which prove the opposite of what they were intended to prove. I’m usually not a fan of anecdote-based newspaper articles, especially when there’s absolutely no statistical evidence backing up the selection of certain anecdotes over others. But this article isn’t just of a bad type; it’s a terrible execution of a bad type.
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