Should You Buy Your Kid An Internship?

Posted by: Cathy Arnst on August 21

We spend a lot to raise a child in this country. The US Dept of Agriculture just announced that the average two parent family will spend a total of $221,190 over the next 17 years on a child born this year. That doesn’t include four years of college, and who knows how much that will cost by then? And now there is yet another expense-some parents are buying an internship for their bred-for-success offspring.

Yes, proving that no parenting worry will go unexploited, a fast growing niche has developed for companies likeUniversity of Dreams; they will guarantee placement of your child in a resume-enhancing internship for a fee of anywhere from $5000 to $9500. These are unpaid internships, by the way.

Here’s one families experience, from a New York Times article on buying internships:

Francois Goffinet entered the University of Dreams program in 2007 as a student at the College of William & Mary, he said, because he wanted an internship at a top bank but those banks did not recruit at colleges like his. The University of Dreams advisers polished Francois’s résumé. They coached him on interviews and then helped him secure an internship at UBS, which he then converted into a job offer. “We wanted the biggest and the best,” Francois’s mother, Lynn Andrews, recalled. “No one had the direct route.”

As someone who struggled to find an unpaid internship on her own while in college, for an arts newsletter that lost ifs funding after one issue (thus preparing me for the current state of print journalism), I’m appalled. And angry at the companies that “hire” these interns, who pay for the right to work for nothing. Is the economy really so bad that a company can’t shell out a few thousand dollars over the summer to a college kid? And what about all the tens of thousands of kids who can’t afford to buy an internship, not to mention work for free. Are they somehow less worthy of that UBS job than the candidate whose parent has deep pockets?

John Dodge, who writes the Thinking Tech blog for the website Smart Planet, has this to say about the practice:

Companies that accept this free help while enriching a middleman should be ashamed. Companies big and small should initiate there own intern programs based solely on merit and relationships with colleges which educate the individuals they need. Internships should be an integral function of the human resources department. If a company can’t find good interns, I wonder how they stay in business. — Whatever happened to individual initiative? Whatever happened to the kid who banged on doors and used his or her dynamism and guile to land an internship? Kids should not have the door slammed because someone bought their way in.

Are John and I living in the past? Is this just the way the world works these days? Should it be? What do you think?

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