Washington, D.C. will soon be filled with bright-eyed students, eager to leverage prestigious federal summer internships as their stepping-stone to a government or legislative career.
Many come from affluent families, working with lawmakers for free while their parents pay upwards of $6,000 for living expenses. Such internships are a rite of passage for building the necessary networks that lead to coveted entry-level government jobs.
Students who must earn a living wage to survive have little chance of making it in a system where privilege opens doors. Despite a small number of paid pipeline positions, paid federal internships have remained the exception rather than the norm. The limited number of paid programs is not enough to close the access gap.
For example, a 2019 survey report by advocacy organization Pay Our Interns found that more than 76 percent of paid summer congressional interns were white, and only 6.7 percent were Black. Universal student pay policies are more effective, but few federal officials have pledged to pay all students a living wage.
In 2021, a burgeoning federal movement toward pay signaled a sea change. Biden issued a June 2021 executive order committing to decreasing reliance on unpaid internships to diversify the federal workforce. The Securities and Exchange Commission acted first, declaring that its prestigious national SEC Scholars Program would pay all students starting in 2022. The White House and the State Department followed suit.
But the domino effect was short-lived. Despite a 2023 guidance, other federal agencies have made little progress in this promised move toward pay.
And without any transparency about its reasoning, the SEC shocked law school officials by quietly updating its website to state that the fall 2024 SEC Scholar Program will be unpaid.
Some agencies are now shifting the burden of solving the pay problem to students by issuing an ultimatum: Find your own funding, or ask your university for externship credits if you want the privilege of an unpaid summer internship.
The U.S. Department of Labor, charged with protecting the rights of workers, seemingly abdicates its mission altogether, stating that, it “requires all interns not hired through the Pathways Program to receive the equivalent of $15 per hour in funding from an outside source (e.g., academic institution, public interest grant) or to earn academic credit.”
But $15 per hour doesn’t even come close to covering soaring D.C. rents. And even for remote placements, academic credit does not grow on trees. Summer credits usually come with a significant tuition burden not factored into student financial aid budgets. With the average cost of law school attendance totaling $220,335, it misses the point to force students to go deeper into debt to pay for unnecessary summer credits for an unpaid government internship.
This backtracking on pay has significant consequences for students seeking careers in public service. Public interest drift is a well-documented phenomenon in legal education, with students starting law school intent on public service but ending up at law firms instead.
This is not a reflection on the sincerity of today’s law students. It is an outcome of structures that steer students toward the private sector by limiting the feasibility of other options. The public service sector relies on its own roadblock to entry — the unpaid internship.
It’s time that nonprofit and government leaders rethink how they hire. Forcing cash-strapped students to pay their dues by working for free perpetuates a hazing mentality counter to their purported mission. Pipelines to public service require a diverse array of paid student experiences and firm offers of post-graduate employment. To make that happen, government and foundation funders must normalize student pay as a budgetary priority.
Innovative programs are working with universities nationwide to increase public funding for public service internships. I am fortunate to direct the legal externship program at The University of Baltimore, where the Schaefer Center for Public Policy has successfully lobbied the Maryland General Assembly to fund its NextGen Leaders for Public Service Program.
As a result of this collaboration, my students in Maryland public service placements can get a paycheck, even if they are earning academic credit. The payments are modest, but as one of my students facing a utility shutoff told me, the check was just enough to keep the lights on.
Unfortunately, my students working in the federal government do not benefit from this state-funded program. For students interested in federal government service, I have no choice but to tell them that they are out of luck.
Neha Lall is a professor of the practice and director of externships at the University of Baltimore School of Law.
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