As the unpaid internship debate rages on, we’ve forgotten someone:

The Intern.

And not just forgotten; through neglect, naivety and personal agendas… we’ve hurt the very interns we’re trying to help.

How?

By forgetting that beyond unscrupulous employers, there are many others to blame for the plight of interns everywhere, both paid and unpaid.

Let’s take a look at some of the root causes:

Higher Education

We teach too-often-worthless theory regurgitated by tenured professors who’ve never had a job outside academia. We stubbornly promote a learning system based on conformity and compliance instead of creativity and innovation. We’re unwilling to properly fund career services… and then ignore them based on the perception they aren’t helping students.

Most important, we continue to send inexperienced – unemployable – graduates into the world who rarely impress an employer in today’s economy.

Higher education, despite the protests by protectionists from academia, is broken.

Students know this. They know they must do everything possible to gain experience, develop soft skills and learn their trade – including accepting unpaid internships where they may be exploited.

Department of Labor

The creators of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the ambiguous, widely-open-to-interpretation “6 prong test” share a huge part of the blame.

Maybe it’s because they insist on creating guidelines and fact sheets – instead of law. Maybe it’s because they, despite decades of exploitation of young talent, have never created a way to enforce their positions (no, hiding behind minimum wages laws doesn’t count). Maybe it’s because our federal government, including the DOL, hires perhaps more unpaid interns than any other organization in the US. Or, maybe it’s because they waited nearly 80 years to update their view on fair compensation for interns (and even then, most of us went “huh? Wha’d they say?)

The very department designated to protect interns is, at the very least, an impotent bureaucracy incapable of being part of the solution.

The Press

The media knows a hot story when they see one… and they aren’t letting this issue go. They view themselves as Robin Hood, protecting the poor interns they portray as innocent victims of corporate greed.

The trouble is: to gain viewers and readers, the press sells populist hypocrisy.

The broadcasting and print industries are world-famous for their “we all had to start somewhere” unpaid, exploitive internships; they are right up there with other icons of talent exploitation – the fashion and entertainment industries.

Next time you see the New York Times fanning the unpaid internship flame (and there will be a next time) ask them how many unpaid interns are currently on staff. The answer isn’t pretty.

(By the way… ask the same question to the attorneys now making a fortune riding this issue, also in Robin Hood style, to its overly-dramatic conclusion; they can claim some of the blame while chasing ambulances full of unpaid interns).

Those Who Judge an Internship Solely on Paid vs. Unpaid

In large part due to the one-sided press coverage, we’ve become quick to volley stones at any internship labeled “unpaid” – without looking at the many other factors that make an internship good, or bad.

Mentorship. Networking. Experience. Development of marketable soft skills. Industry knowledge not obtained in college. Job Offers. These should all be factors in determining the quality of an internship.

Some paid internships suck. Really suck. Take the insurance industry and their commission-compensated internships that involve nothing but cold-call selling. Take the internships for US Senators where paid interns spend the summer clipping newspaper articles to satisfy the Senators’ vanity.

How do these opportunities pass the sanity test of “good internship” vs. “bad internship.” What did the students learn? Did their career development progress?

Paid doesn’t automatically mean good. It just means the intern was compensated for their time, no matter how that precious early-career time was wasted.

The Parents

We tell our children if they get good grades in high school, go to college and get their degree… a job will be waiting for them at graduation.

What a load of crap. This All-American lie is about a decade old. And we should know better by now.

Yet we coddle our adult children. We believe they’re special; the exception to the new economic rules. And we enable them to treat college as just four more years of high school, rather than the perfect time to work hard and develop skills for a meaningful, profitable career.

Parents are getting older. Regarding the importance of their children’s proactive career development, they are not getting wiser.

The Students and Young Professionals

We live in a society where we don’t expect much from our young talent. And sometimes it seems they don’t expect much from themselves or each other.

That includes quiet toleration of unfair working conditions of any kind, including internships.

No one is more responsible for career development than one’s self. Interns MUST have the knowledge, confidence and support system available to say “no, thank you… I’ll wait for a good, mutually-beneficial internship where I can learn and thrive.”

Until the students, recent graduates and career changers stop accepting exploitive internships there WILL be employers willing to offer them.

The Rest of Us

For far too long, those of us who sincerely felt that internships were an extension of the education process – and not “labor” – have been living like an ostrich with our heads in the sand.

Maybe, according to today’s standards, there’s no such thing as internships where both employers AND interns can benefit; the proverbial win-win. Maybe mentorship doesn’t have more value than minimum wage. Maybe networking and making lifelong connections isn’t worth as much as a weekly stipend.

Maybe, just maybe, we should give in… and accept that unpaid, yet monumentally beneficial and constructive internships… are nothing more than dinosaurs doomed to extinction.

And The Hurt Begins

“Ay, there’s the rub…”

How are we hurting, rather than helping, throughout this self-serving, Occupy-Wall Street-like, protect-the-little-guy debate?

While the burgeoning young professional overcomes the troubles with higher education, the failure of the DOL, the flame-fanning of the press and the attorneys, the faux-supportive lies of their parents, themselves and us ostriches… none of the systemic root causes get fixed. Nothing changes, except perhaps an exchange of money from employer to what will be classified forever more as an employee.

In the process, at least short-term, many unpaid – yet career-defining – internships will go away.

Employers will be too afraid, or not be able to afford, internship programs. Mentorship, critical to career success, will become even more rare in the workplace. Learning will be restricted to the classroom – eliminating the hands-on learning employers insist upon.

Internships will develop into a Gladiator-style, ultra-competitive arena; in many cases, only the elite students – with well-connected helicopter parents – will stand a chance of survival.

We all know it’s time to end exploitive internships… so perhaps the paid vs. unpaid debate will ultimately have winners.

I’m just not sure the passionate, dedicated intern – the one doing the good work for all the right reasons while hustling to carve out their early career – is among them.

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About the Author: CEO and Founder of YouTern, Mark Babbitt is a serial mentor who has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Mashable, Forbes and Under30CEO.com regarding job search, career development, internships and higher education’s role in preparing emerging talent for the workforce. A keynote speaker and blogger, Mark’s contributions include Huffington Post, Switch and Shift, The Daily Muse and Under30CEO.



Mark has been honored to be named to GenJuice’s list of “Top 100 Most Desirable Mentors” and was recently featured on HR Examiner’s “Top 25 Trendspotters in HR” and several top blogger lists, including JobMob’s “Top Career Bloggers of 2012”. Contact Mark via email or on Twitter!

Image originally appeared at nytimes.com.