Students shouldn’t pay for internships

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Internships during college can provide quality, real-world experience for students before they enter their field after graduation, but making students pay for their internship credits is discouraging and costly.

A committee within ASMSU, MSU’s undergraduate student government, is looking into certain colleges’ requirement of students to pay for credit hours at a higher cost than the university spends to provide resources to students during their internships.

It is understandable why students need to pay for credits that are spent on instructor-led classes, but having to pay for the hours spent working as an intern seems deceptive.

Most student interns receive little pay for their work ­or sometimes no pay at all. Some students might even have to use all of their money made at the internship to pay for their credit hours at MSU, a very illogical trade-off.

The system in place basically forces students to pay to work. For those who are lucky enough to receive a stipend for their internship, a big percentage of that money goes to MSU. The current rate for undergraduates goes up to $444.50 per credit hour.

Additionally, many internships are worth more credit hours than actual time spent working or with internship advisers. ASMSU provost Zach Taylor told The State News in a recent article (“ASMSU debates internship credit” SN 2/6) when he interned at a program through James Madison College, he spent less than three hours with his internship adviser during the internship, yet received 12 credits for it.

Taylor, and other students, are paying for an education that they might or might not have obtained.
MSU could be benefitting from internships they had no part in helping students find. Although MSU is very useful in helping students find internships, most of the time students are on their own once they start working as an intern.

It is up to each college at MSU to decide whether or not they require internships. For students who are in colleges that require them, they are paying a large amount of money to do so.

For others whose colleges make internships optional, having to pay credit hours for them might discourage students from applying to them.

Although internships provide unparalleled work experience, some students would rather their credit hours and money be used for classes. Certain majors also emphasize internships, so students in those majors end up paying more for the experience of learning.

Make no mistake, internships are valuable, and students should be encouraged to go out and obtain them whenever possible. But they shouldn’t have to do so at the expense of their bank accounts.

As an alternative to charging students for their required internships, MSU could lump internships into upper-level classes. For example, colleges could make internships or plans for an internship a prerequisite for a required 400-level class. This method would make internship credits a part of classes so students aren’t paying twice for experience.

MSU charging students to pay for credit hours used at internships is costly. Students shouldn’t have to pay for real-world experience, and the system shouldn’t discourage others from applying for optional internships.

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