Interns From Ivy Leagues Or Private Schools Are Unwanted

steve-howard 12 years ago |

> To be fair, there are bad apples in every college and it’s likely that expectations from Tier 1 schools are higher. But, below are a few stories that you can judge yourself.

This is a terrible article and the above line confirms that it's essentially collecting some bad anecdotes to paint a broader picture of "tier-1" interns.

canistr 12 years ago | |

I agree, particularly with the anecdote of the intern countering for a $15/hour wage. NYC is by no means a cheap city and even I was making $15/hour as an intern many, many years ago. $10/hour is rather insulting and barely makes a dent in the living costs of a student yet alone their tuition costs.

greenyoda 12 years ago | | |

If you're working as an intern in software development, chances are you're already making a positive contribution to the bottom line, and $15 might even be way too low. However, if you're a marketing intern, like the person in this story, you might actually have a negative worth to the company (the time it takes others to teach you what you need to know could exceed your productivity), in which case the $10 per hour might be extremely generous.

canistr 12 years ago | | |

While I agree in part that internships are generally a form of "charity" or public good that a company will provide in return for a small amount of work being completed, the case for $10/hour is still ridiculous in this day and age. And I'm not even getting into the discussion of minimum wage jobs.

canttestthis 12 years ago | | |

But thats contradictory. If internships are a form of charity, or public good, then companies shouldn't have to pay interns at all. Its ridiculous that interns get _paid_ $10 and provide almost nothing to the company in return.

canistr 12 years ago | | |

Not at all. Charity/public good doesn't imply free work. And it's still up to the company to provide work that generates value for themselves. It's not free on either part of the company or the intern.

I don't know what the case is in the US, but in Canada, the government does provide some taxable benefits to the company for hiring interns or people between 18-24. I don't know the specifics, but they do exist.

mathattack 12 years ago | | |

It depends on the field. Software and Finance? Yes, terribly low for NYC. Fashion or Advertising? Perhaps par for the course.

eli_gottlieb 12 years ago | | |

Wow, I'm interning at a software company in the Bay Area and my normalized hourly wage is way more than $15/hour. Is it just me, or do a lot of firms these days just exploit cheap labor as a way to avoid admitting that their business models are actually quite low-value?

dshefchik 12 years ago | | |

They've been doing that since the dawn of the internship. Students are just starting to not accept that kind of crappy treatment

TrainedMonkey 12 years ago | | |

I think that is just Bay Area and/or tech bias. My own internship years ago started at $15 and quickly scaled up. I was going to community college at that time. *typoed

eli_gottlieb 12 years ago | | |

Ok, in support of your point, I got my BSc Comp Sci in 2011, have previous professional experience, and I'm really just working full time for two months while on grad-school vacation. So while I'm justifiably not paid as much as the real full-time engineers here, I'm more valuable to the company (I would hope!) than an average college sophomore doing his/her first internship in his/her own profession.

Again: anecdotal evidence, disregard that I suck bananas, etc.

mathattack 12 years ago | |

I think part of the issue is the screening and mentoring. If you just screen for the school, of course you won't get a good intern. If you accept falling asleep once, of course it will become a pattern.

My experience with people with difficult majors from top schools is they are workaholics if you pay them good money and give them real projects. If you hire a lacrosse playing English major from an ivy league, and pay substandard wages, don't expect to get the cream of the crop.

gohrt 12 years ago |

"Interns who want to get paid > $10/hr to do professional-quality work are unwanted."

Is there a browser plugin that erases Forbes and Medium links from HN?

nextstep 12 years ago |

Can we stop posting stuff from Forbes' blogging platform? This kind of content is rarely well-researched (or interesting).

TrainedMonkey 12 years ago |

All the smart/hardworking interns from tier 1 schools end up in tier 1 companies. So chance of getting a bad apple for an average company is so much higher.

ethanazir 12 years ago |

There is this issue: if you go to school to learn- you pay the school big bucks; if you go to a company and still need to learn a lot before you are worth anything; and there is little expectation of you staying with the company long enough to be worth anything... its why the military requires 4 year commitments before they pay for your training.

habosa 12 years ago |

Yeah! All Ivy League kids demand to be paid too much and then just fall asleep at their desks and lie about deaths in the family!

Disclaimer: I go to UPenn, but that doesn't make this article less of a pile of bullshit.