Katherine Haas plans to pay $931 to have an internship this summer. The junior marketing major will be working in the marketing department at Epic Records, where an intern is required to receive academic credit in lieu of pay.

“It would be nice if I could get a paid internship, but since I can’t do slave labor, I have to have the credit from the school to do the internship,” Haas said.

While internships that require credit aren’t necessarily on the rise or typical of all majors, Haas’ situation is not unique. Some students feel pressured to take them when they are not offered competitive paid internships and when positions where credit is required are more common than internships without any form of compensation. But federal law says an unpaid internship must grant college credit, and students struggle or prefer not to pay for it.

“There’s basically a federal law that says if you do work, you have to be compensated for it, which is totally fair. Companies, whether they don’t have the budget for it or whatever the reason is, they use the loophole of providing credit to students,” said Kelly Jean Brown, assistant director of the Career Development Center at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

When a student is not paying for summer tuition, he or she must pay the university an additional fee for the credit. At Syracuse University this summer, the cost of a credit for a full-time undergraduate student is $931. The cost is more for graduate students and less for part-time students, said Rhona Jones, internship coordinator at the SU Center for Career Services. One credit is usually enough to fulfill an employer’s requirement, though a student can register an internship for up to six credits if desired, Jones said.

Each summer, about 250 students take internships for academic credit that are processed as electives through the Center for Career Services. This statistic is not representative of SU, however, because there are students in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, College of Engineering and Computer Science, and School of Information Studies who register their internship credit through their individual colleges, Jones said. The number also includes students who chose to take an internship for credit even if the company does not require it.

Molly Reynolds, a junior social work and psychology major, was offered academic credit for her unpaid internship in Africa but didn’t want to pay for more than the travel expenses she will already have.

“I don’t need (the credit). I think it’s pretty ridiculous, having to pay for an internship,” she said.

Some students register the credit through local community schools, a cheaper option, but there is no way to track the number of students who do, Jones said. Although she is not involved with transferring the credits, Brown said she believes most programs would rather accept credits from SU than from other schools.

Other students work part-time jobs to either pay for the credit or to earn the money not being made at an unpaid internship.

“A lot of students find it difficult,” Jones said. “There will be quite a few students or parents who contact us to see if there is any other way or if there is any financial support available.”

Some students find their own loopholes in the system.

Matt Rivers, a senior broadcast journalism major, has had two internships that required academic credit. He didn’t need the credit to go toward his degree, so he told his employers that he was getting credit when he wasn’t.

“They give you those papers and make sure you have them signed, but no one checks up with you,” he said.

But Jones said she has noticed that internships in the communications industry have become stricter when it comes to requiring credit.

“Over the last three or four summers, companies by and large have become stricter and stricter, like they would insist on being able to see the registration on the student’s schedule before they’d let them walk in the door,” she said, adding that she knows of one student who wasn’t allowed in the elevator at her internship until she could prove she registered for an internship credit.

Still, in what Jones called “a major change,” NBC Universal recently reversed its previously strict policy on requiring academic credit and began accepting letters of support from the university so students don’t need to pay for a credit.

Despite the fact that some students may not want to pay for credit for their internships, Jones said there is some value in doing so.

“From a student’s point of view, a credit internship brings in a whole extra dimension of learning,” Jones said. “They have a faculty sponsor who’s communicating with them, making suggestions, helping them interpret and understand what they’re experiencing. And there’s the value of having it on their transcript.”

“Some (employers) may decide or may calculate that a credit internship involves a more serious intent on the student’s part. But in general, what they tend to look at is what the experience was like and what the student learned from it,” she said.

When Haas, the intern at Epic Records, interned for the same company last year for credit, she helped with press release kits, mail and invoices, work she said was educational in terms of her major.

She would have preferred doing a paid internship instead of receiving credits for two summers in a row, though, she said. But she still appreciated the experience, saying, “It looks good for my résumé.”

 

Published on April 27, 2010 at 12:00 pm