It is almost summer. For many organizations in Boston, that means intern season. I direct the internship program in the Political Science Department at UMass Boston and have a message: if you don’t pay your interns, you can’t have interns.
I know what some of you are thinking: our budgets are too tight! We want to give college students opportunities. Think of all networks they will gain!
Sure. For the already advantaged.
Legislative offices, non-profits, or similar organizations that have internship programs which do not pay embrace class replication. A properly descriptive “job” posting for unpaid internships includes: organization endorses social reproduction, promotes the rich get richer, and undermines the American Dream.
Why? Because poor and working-class students simply cannot afford to take an unpaid internship.
College is already the stretch. Internships are heralded as a “must” for landing the first professional job. Working-class students almost never have the social networks that grease the path to landing them. 
Mom, dad, or family friends are not on Boards or seated at the top echelons of state government. Working-class students lack of connections make seeking an internship wildly intimidating. When they conquer that uphill battle to locate a desirable internship and secure an interview only to find out it is unpaid? Uphill battle becomes insurmountable mountain.
Romantic, deeply dated, visions of college respond: make some sacrifices and take the internship as it will pay future dividends.
No.
Today’s modal college student at a Massachusetts public college or university, like UMass Boston, is already making the sacrifices. According to Massachusetts Department of Higher Education and Wisconsin HOPE Lab, in 2018, 44% of MA community college students and 33% of MA four-year college students report food insecurity. They regularly choose between meals and paying tuition/fees in a Commonwealth that has largely abandoned them. After all, according to US News and World Report, Massachusetts is 44th amongst the 50 states in terms of the amount of debt one accrues upon graduation from a public institution and a dismal 43rd in tuition and fee burden. That UMass Boston, like 24 of the 29 of Massachusetts state colleges and universities, has a food pantry to meet student need is no accident. It is direct result of Commonwealth policy choices.
Unpaid internships are an added, impossible, burden. Our students are already deeply indebted even as they work 20, 30, 40 hours weekly to pay for their education. Try telling these students to take an unpaid internship.
I can’t.
I see it daily in my office. The student who knows they are missing out on the networks and professional socialization internships facilitate. That same student who is already saddled with loan debt, over-tired from hours of low-wage service work, negotiating an ugly commute, but still striving for an internship. Offering them the “choice” of an unpaid internship is unconscionable. But, still, they regularly internalize not interning as personal rather than structural failure.
This semester I have an emblematic student who begins her day at 5am in the Financial District as a barista. Our class is at 12:30. She negotiated with her job to leave at noon. She takes an Uber because of the time constraint to the JFK/UMass Boston T stop, taking the campus shuttle from there. Stopping the Uber at the T rather than campus saves about two dollars. An important two dollars when you work to pay for school. She comes to class and is always prepared, analytically engaged, and advances the discourse. And then she goes to her second job.
Telling her, and her student colleagues, to take an unpaid internship renders invisible her hustle, her reality, her intellectual talent. Unpaid means cannot experience. She loses as do the political institutions that lack working-class insights.
Landing the internship is the goal for middle-class and affluent college students in the Commonwealth. From there, families can make it happen. Perhaps with some sacrifices but not the dire ones UMass Boston students and their brethren already make. One can take the internship. The other cannot. The latter works for school. The former might work for the internship.
Massachusetts, summer is intern season. Unless you pay your interns you cannot have them.