Little headway has been made to implement a campus-wide policy concerning unpaid summer internships since a December meeting by the University Senate Committee on Instruction that began looking into the issue.

The committee members issued a questionnaire to all SU schools and colleges to determine the extent to which summer internships were used, whether they were required or optional, paid or unpaid, taken for credit or not, and at what time, according to the report on unpaid internships presented by committee member Can Isik.

Initial responses indicated a broad range of policies by a number of individual colleges, Isik said. Because the committee remains in the early stages of deliberation, committee members did not publicly issue the responses.

Isik said it is still ‘hard to tell’ if the surveys will carry any recommendation for alleviating the financial burden of summer internships for students. Isik described the committee’s preliminary reports as ‘difficult to summarize in its current state.’

The report sparked a discussion about unpaid summer internships.

Businesses and institutions cannot legally withhold compensation from workers, said Steven Diaz, an associate professor of mathematics and a committee member. To bypass paying salaries to college interns, companies encourage them to seek credit from their respective colleges as compensation, he said.

Internships that fall during the regular school year are typically accepted and reviewed without much ado. But to receive credit during the summer at SU, interns must also be tuition-paying students, Diaz said. Summer interns who are not enrolled in SU’s summer session while doing an internship are forced to pay tuition to receive credit, Diaz said.

‘Most people on the committee want to find a way to relieve the tuition burden,’ he said.

But plausible solutions have been few and far between, Diaz said. The committee members have discussed allowing students to take advantage of unused fall and spring credits to alleviate the cost, among other alternatives.

Diaz and other committee members are also concerned about the case-to-case nature of internships because some interns receive practical, real-world experience, and others perform secretarial duties.

Internships remain an inarguable asset to a fresh-out-of-college resume, said Robin Richards, CEO of internships.com, an internship search engine geared toward college students.

‘The purpose of an internship is resume-building, experience, access,’ Richards said.

The sheer presence of an internship helps determine an applicant’s fate, not whether or not the internship was paid, Richards said. Only 38 percent of employers, nationally, pay interns, according to statistics from Richards’ office.

That’s a practice that Amanda Nicholson, another member of the instruction committee, said is a ‘bit like slave labor.’

In addition to paying summer tuition, students are expected to pay for out-of-pocket expenses such as housing, food and transportation to their workplace. Nicholson, a professor in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, said she fears unpaid internships are skewed against students. She said employers who take advantage of students as free labor should take the blame.

‘If someone has a job, they should be paid for it,’ she said. ‘Students get the raw end of the deal.’

dbtruong@syr.edu

Published on January 24, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Debbie: dbtruong@syr.edu | @debbietruong