NYT - Unpaid Internships Separate Haves from Have-Nots

[tomfodw]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/10/politics/10interns.html

Crucial Unpaid Internships Increasingly Separate the Haves From the Have-Nots
By JENNIFER 8. LEE

Published: August 10, 2004

WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 - Susan Lim, a 20-year-old Georgetown University student, is working 89 hours a week this summer: two part-time jobs and an unpaid internship offered through the Public Policy and International Affairs Program.

Her schedule - working for money as a clerical assistant and a summer school resident adviser and without pay as a researcher at the public policy program - is a sharp contrast to that of her Georgetown classmates. Many of them have parents who support them through unpaid summer internships, or they have qualified for paid internships because of experience as unpaid interns during high school.

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But as internships rise in importance as critical milestones along the path to success, questions are emerging about whether they are creating a class system that discriminates against students from less affluent families who have to turn down unpaid internships to earn money for college expenses.

"It's something that really makes me nuts," said Cokie Roberts, an ABC News correspondent who spoke out about the problem on Capitol Hill several weeks ago at a gathering of Congressional interns. "By setting up unpaid internship programs, it seems to me that without completely recognizing it, it sets up a system where you are making it ever more difficult for people who don't have economic advantages to catch up."

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"The more glamorous an internship, the less likely it is paid," Mr. Oldman said. "Washington in general has high-demand internships. In most cases they don't have to pay or they don't have to pay much."

And since Washington internships serve as a pipeline that brings policy makers into the nation's capital, some people fear that over the long term, internships will be another means, like the rising costs of college tuition, of squeezing voices from the working class and even the middle class out of high-level policy debates.



Once again, those what have take care of their own, leaving everyone else behind. The conservatives pay lip service to the idea of equal opportunity, but in reality they don't give a shit. The only thing they really care about is passing their money, power & prestige down to the next generation. (To be fair, the same could often be said of some wealthy liberals.)

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