[...] Would you Buy Your Kid an Internship at Vogue for $40,000? [...]

you can bid on these types of internships for charity for much less then this –go to charitybuzz.com under smileyfaces auction…

Oh my goodness. I think internships are horrible and need to be banned. I am sure there are those with wonderful internship experiences but come on – it is unpaid slave labor. I got stuck in a hospital filled with patients who were living with brain injuries; and when I say “stuck” I mean it. During the interview process, the powers that be said that I would plan daily activities, help with said activities and generally have a good time. I got physically abused, yelled at and tormented every day and then went to my “real” job so I could eat and pay a few bills. It was a terrible time in my life and I would have traded it for, well, just about anything. The kicker of the whole deal is – I never helped anyone – not in the grand scheme of things. As far as helicopter parenting – it only hinders the offspring as it eases the minds of parents. (Although, I think I would have liked having a helicopter parent come in and swoop me out of that situation.).

I don’t like it one bit. Mainly because of the huge advantage given to those with more money.

An internship at City Hall was what paved the way for my professional success now. Granted, it was paid, but I would have scraped by and still taken it were it unpaid. Three of the most important references I have on my resume came from relationships I established because of that internship. Especially in this economy when nobody is hiring, unpaid internships are an important way for a new college grad to get some relevant experience on their resume so they are more marketable when jobs do start to reappear in their field. Getting exposure in your chosen field and finding a good mentor is critical, and an internship helps to facilitate this. Yeah, there are crappy internships and I’m sorry for people who have suffered through them. I don’t think that diminishes the overall utility of a good internship though.

I’m not at all surprised that people with money pay for the best internships for their kids either. They pay for the best schools, make endowments and buy buildings for their Ivy-league Alma Maters so that little Duncely can go take up a space that would be better used by a clever-but-poor peer. It’s the kind of privilege that drives these people to focus on accumulating big piles of money in the first place.

I agree that these unpaid internships just exacerbate problems. How many recent grads for that matter can afford an apartment in New York while working for free? At the same time, nepotism will occur regardless. There’s plenty of ‘co-op’ positions every year at the bank where my husband works and every year they all go to kids of the executives, or their friends. It was really bad in one department where the daughter of a c-suite member was getting married in Arizona and all the interns booked off time around then too – they were going to the same wedding.

This is not actually a problem in the engineering fields. There is no such thing as an “unpaid internship” in my industry, and even lowly mechanicals like myself (without degrees) make about seventeen dollars per hour. In addition, the skills my brethren develop at school allow young folks to moonlight doing scut work like designing housings for prototype devices that no engineering firm would ever consider – but even that pays handsomely for a twenty-two year old.

If you wanna get paid, you gotta have skills. If you don’t have skills, you end up scrabbling for the advertising industry’s scraps. Good luck with those liberal arts degrees!