As the semester ends, students are locking in their summer plans. With ever-growing competition in the job market, many students see college internships as a crucial step, yet many of these opportunities are unpaid.
Having an internship during college doubles the chance that a student has a job lined up for them at graduation, but getting an internship is difficult. Internship postings were down 17.5% last year, with 8.2 million college students seeking one while only 3.6 million got hired, according to Forbes.
According to a 2022 study by the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions (CCWT), 30.8% to 58.1% of internships are unpaid, thereby limiting participation.
Senior Research Scientist at the USC Center for Effective Organizations, Alec Levenson, said that as the cost of the university experience rises, taking on an unpaid internship is an additional challenge.
“If it’s an unpaid internship, as opposed to a paid internship, or an unpaid internship as opposed to [students] being able to go and work a job while they’re in school to help make ends meet,” he said. “That could be a real financial burden for them, and then kind of close them out from opportunities they would have otherwise.”
Over 21% of USC’s 2025-2026 incoming class were first-generation college students. According to a 2024 study from California Competes, first-generation Californian students were three times less likely to complete a paid internship.
Eric Anicich, an associate professor of management and organization, said that first-generation students or students from lower-income families have to work more explicitly for the income rather than the work experience. Additionally, he said that those who are struggling financially are “necessarily more focused on the short term than the long term.”
“It’s hard to look two or three steps down the road of your professional career and say, ‘Okay, I can do this unpaid internship, because I know that a year from now, maybe it will open a door for me or for me,’” he said. “A lot of people don’t have the luxury to think in that long-term orientation.”
Inequities in internship access also extend across gender lines. California Competes found that women were less likely than men to complete paid internships at 4% compared to 9%.
Yet even for students who can take on unpaid internships, the experience can come with significant financial and personal strain.
Anicich recalled his unpaid internship in a research position at Harvard after graduating from college, in hopes of gaining experience before applying to a PhD program.
“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “I mean, it was stressful. I was able to pull it off, but it was definitely a burden; I was kind of living off loans at that point.”
USG senator and sophomore majoring in public policy, Zehran Muqtadir, said there is a culture that expects every college student to be doing something over the summer, yet many end up with “bottom of the barrel unpaid internships” because competition for paid positions is so intense.
Muqtadir said that he saw differences in how he was treated between his paid and unpaid positions.
“A few unpaid internships I did were on political campaigns, and sometimes they buy us pizza and stuff, but we’d have to pay for our own gas,” he said. “I worked 10-hour days some days.”
To fulfill his major requirements, Muqtadir must complete a semester-long internship in exchange for course credit. However, USC also offers a variety of courses that allow students to get credit for their internships.
Raina Ginsburg, a sophomore majoring in legal studies and anthropology, has an unpaid internship at the Natural History Museum, where she said it has been a positive experience and a “really important insight into what anthropologists do.”
Jennifer Baek, a junior majoring in law, history and culture, started her internship at Asian Americans Advancing Justice Socal (AJSOCAL) last fall as part of the Pre-Law Experience at USC Joint Educational Project and extended it this semester to get course credit.
Although her position is unpaid, she said she does not take a financial loss because she commutes by bus, but that for pre-law students, unpaid internships are to be expected, and it is “a price you have to pay” to get experience.
“I think it’s worth it in terms of developing experience for a paid internship,” she said. “I can confidently say that if I didn’t do the array of unpaid internships that I did in LA, then I wouldn’t have really landed my paid internships.”
Lecturer in law and supervisor for Gould’s internship program, Jeffrey Rogers, said that the “vast majority” of students feel that they gain valuable experience from their unpaid internships. He works with students to make sure they feel satisfied.
We want to make sure that they actually get something out of it, especially if it is an unpaid internship,” he said. “They shouldn’t be overworked, especially if they’re working for free.”
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires all for-profit employers to pay their employees; interns are not considered employees.
Instead, the FLSA created a primary-beneficiary test to determine the employer-intern relationship. The test includes that the intern understands there will be no compensation and no promise of future employment, that the internship is tied to coursework, and that the intern is only there to the extent that they are gaining a beneficial learning experience.
According to Forbes, in 2011, two interns sued Fox Searchlight, alleging that they completed work that a paid employee would have otherwise done, thus violating the FLSA. Their case led to other lawsuits being brought against companies like Condé Nast, NBCUniversal, Sony and Columbia Records, Viacom and Warner Music Group, who all now compensate their interns.
Additionally, since interns are not employees, they are not protected against discrimination or harassment. While some states, like California and New York, have passed laws protecting interns, most have not.
Lauren Lee White, a part-time lecturer who also supervises Annenberg’s journalism internship course and has been a professor for the reporter in past semesters, wrote in a text message that “students are especially vulnerable to exploitation in internships.”
“The main type of exploitation I see has to do with time,” she wrote. “Because the gig economy has normalized paying people only for the precise moments they are actually working and not for the time when they’re ‘on call,’ interns are sometimes expected to work unreasonable hours and be on call, but only the times they are performing tasks are counted toward the internship.
Antonio Bartholome, student services director at Roski, which also offers an internship course, said the school encourages students to speak up if their position becomes toxic, and that faculty will work with students to help them gracefully exit the internship.
Senior director of the USC career center, Lori Shreve Blake, said that, as unpaid interns, students have the power to negotiate what they want to get out of their positions.
“They are providing free service to the employer, you’re in the driver’s seat as the person they’re going to hire,” she said. “I think that students, when they are taking on an unpaid internship, should speak up, find their voice, negotiate and not stretch themselves so thin that they can’t find other ways to make money or focus on their schoolwork.”
Yet, despite the career center’s encouragement to employers to offer paid internships, many still do not, in what Anicich said is an economic decision.
“I think the mindset, unfortunately, of many companies is ‘okay, why pay a group of people who are actively interested in these roles when they’re unpaid?’” he said. “Why spend money on something that you don’t need to spend money on?”
For some students, the decision ultimately comes down to whether they can afford the risk.
“I am very grateful that I was able to do [an internship]. I think that I was able to do it largely because of financial support from the school,” Baek said. “But at the end of the day, it’s a privilege.”