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Halisnacks posted:Yes, let's look to France for examples of how to foster a competitive business environment. Yeah because France and western europe with basic labor rights are shitholes next to USA #1
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Mar 15, 2014 17:40
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I live in a Western European country and did an unpaid internship in another Western European country. USA is not "#1" but romanticising France and "Western Europe" (which I take to include Spain, Portugal, Italy) betrays your ignorance pretty badly. You can decry the fact that not everywhere has made unpaid internships illegal, or you can retrain, take ownership of your future, and enter a field in which your (entry-level, experience-seeking) labour is valued.
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Mar 15, 2014 18:44
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Unpaid internships gently caress over the poor and force a lot of recent college grads into low-skill retail jobs. Underemployment is growing in a huge way and companies are continuing to benefit from this by getting more and more work done for free by interns when they used to have to pay for it. It's galling that college kids mount themselves with 10's of thousands in debt and then are expected to work for free as an in for a lot of fields. You can't have a society entirely made up of computer engineers.
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Mar 15, 2014 18:57
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Why are young people cool with saddling themselves with debt for a degree that is barely worth the paper it's printed on yet morally outraged at the idea of incurring debt to get working experience that actually is valued?
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Mar 15, 2014 19:39
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gigawhite posted:Unpaid internships gently caress over the poor and force a lot of recent college grads into low-skill retail jobs. Underemployment is growing in a huge way and companies are continuing to benefit from this by getting more and more work done for free by interns when they used to have to pay for it. It's galling that college kids mount themselves with 10's of thousands in debt and then are expected to work for free as an in for a lot of fields. You can't have a society entirely made up of computer engineers. As an engineer/accountant, if everyone was an engineer or accountant nobody would be unemployed!!! Problem solved!! Market mischief managed!!!
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Mar 15, 2014 20:00
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Halisnacks posted:Why are young people cool with saddling themselves with debt for a degree that is barely worth the paper it's printed on yet morally outraged at the idea of incurring debt to get working experience that actually is valued? I'm pretty sure they're upset about both you mong.
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Mar 15, 2014 20:02
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I'm a history and a business/finance major about to graduate. The difference between not only the pay but the relevance of intership experience within these fields was incredibly striking. All the museums and non-profits that showed up to advertise their interships really left a bad tase in my mouth. Low pay is one thing, but using college kids to do menial clerical work and manual labor with zero research exposure is pretty exploitive. The Finance internships I ended up doing paid a lot ($6,000 a month), but they were actual no-poo poo jobs that taught me a lot. It really made me appreciate that unless I wanted to roll the dice and make an attempt at a professorship, my history degree was largely worthless. The scary thing is that this also occured to many of the other kids and pushed most of them into attending law school.
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Mar 15, 2014 20:29
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Halisnacks posted:Why are young people cool with saddling themselves with debt for a degree that is barely worth the paper it's printed on yet morally outraged at the idea of incurring debt to get working experience that actually is valued? Kids at 18 shouldn't be able to sign a contract giving them infinite loans for schooling, but hey, Murrca.
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Mar 15, 2014 20:30
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EugeneJ posted:Kids at 18 shouldn't be able to sign a contract giving them infinite loans for schooling, but hey, Murrca. Without this, you'd have even more crying about upward mobility being impossible.
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Mar 15, 2014 20:44
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Halisnacks posted:Why are young people cool with saddling themselves with debt for a degree that is barely worth the paper it's printed on yet morally outraged at the idea of incurring debt to get working experience that actually is valued? Because you're paying for a specific, described curriculum, while a large amount of internships are menial data entry/clerical positions that don't teach you poo poo? Also being a college student is awesome and being an intern is usually getting crapped on by half of the people you work with, and never even getting the chance at a random co-ed hand beezy or something.
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Mar 15, 2014 21:33
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I did an unpaid internship overseas. I lost so much money on it and I hated every minute of it (I discovered I do NOT get along with Italian culture, it was a very long three months). But I did get to do actual work for the company and not just bullshit clerical stuff, and it's the first thing that popped out on my resume while applying for real jobs and it helped me land a full time job in my field right out of college. Internships are how you get that magical 1-3 years' experience all "entry level" jobs require. They're a necessary evil and I don't think the fact that most are unpaid is going to change at any point soon. My company only offers internships when they have the money to pay for it. We still call up our summer intern every so often to ask her questions about stuff she worked on because it was actual real engineering for real parts for our product, so not all internships are awful. Just most.
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Mar 18, 2014 04:17
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I did an unpaid internship at the US Embassy in Madrid. It sucked - I was a mail retriever and data input monkey 20 hours a week while still working and going to class outside of that.
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Mar 18, 2014 18:48
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Bloody Queef posted:
Besides, not every student in university is cut out to be a petrochemist, financial analyst or paralegal. If they were, do you really think there'd be $27/hr internships floating around? Supply and demand applies here as well.
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Mar 18, 2014 22:23
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Golden Bee posted:In a culture that deifies "Doing what you love" and "go to college or join the army", it's hard to blame 17 year olds for falling for a glossy, million dollar catalog and tour. The modern college campus is a becoming more and more a fairytale castle of 24/7 entertainment, and if the overarching cultural narrative is "If you dream it, you can do it", choosing to major in something you like becomes a reasonable proposition. A lot of corporate types turn into embittered shitlords so anything that might involve doing something they they enjoy makes them see red. Also anecdotally I know a woman who went to UChicago for Art History (a much maligned degree) and now makes a ton of money working at Sotheby's. Meanwhile all the math majors I know (even the ones who went to ivy league places) are tutoring kids at Kumon or unemployed. The degree is not just the sole determinant of a person's career potential.
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Mar 18, 2014 23:32
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Unpaid internships aren't just harmful to the interns themselves - they're also harmful to actual employees who get pushed out and replaced by interns. Why hire an entry-level worker right out of college and pay them eight bucks an hour when you can "hire" an entry-level intern right out of college, pay them nothing, and six months later let them go with a promise to give a good reference and "hire" a replacement? Not only are you exploiting the intern to do free work you would've otherwise had to pay someone to do, but the person who would've been paid for that work is no longer getting paid to do that work. Now, here's the interesting part: that's illegal. If your company derives any benefit at all from an intern's work, then they're legally considered to be an "employee" and have to be treated like one - including being subject to minimum wage laws, and it's also illegal to use interns to replace paid workers (unless you're a nonprofit or a politician, in which case you're exempt from all this). Internships are supposed to be purely educational, purely for the student's benefit, more like a long-term work shadowing than what internships usually become. If the company gets any benefit from the intern, they have to compensate the intern appropriately for their contribution to the company's bottom line. The problem with unpaid internships, really, is enforcement, mainly due to the fact that anyone with the scholarships/savings/rich parents required to work for free without starving or even being mad about it is too bright-eyed and naive to report the employer to the Department of Labor.
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Mar 20, 2014 02:09
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I've done 503(c)3 work for a 100% unpaid organization, this is something that helps the community, makes around 30k / year after costs, and we could not hold events if we wanted to if we needed to go with a funded model. Some years we do not even get to attend free and this is at the Chair / Treasurer level. This area is what the IRS calls public good and I am 100% in favor in being able to give my time freely as its basically giving back to the community. Unpaid corporate internships are banned by the IRS and DOL. However the DOL does not enforce this at all as they are underfunded and do not have the resources. The law does allow former interns to sue for back wages, but they cant get much more the the minimal wage they would have gotten from the internship as a result of the suit. Unpaid internships in Movies and Fashion, are known to be so bad that the movie studios and fashion industry make it an additional line item on the balance sheet that they cant compete with each other with out them. Total crap but a good way for a 100k settlement is to sue the studio and ask for a settlement, you wont work, but you will get 5 times what you would have been paid, and there are employers who value people who can stand up for themselves. Most company's hide them from the IRS by not counting interns on the books, this is why you cant get credit for your unpaid internships sometimes. Its mostly just to ensure the IRS cant audit them and ask why they did not pay the intern.
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Mar 23, 2014 03:03
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PyRosflam posted:However the DOL does not enforce this at all as they are underfunded and do not have the resources. Just to add to this - my cousin was owed vacation time from his ex-employer and filed with NY's Department of Labor last month for reimbursement. When he called to follow up, they told him they're currently 3 years behind.
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Mar 23, 2014 03:18
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I've got an interview in the morning with the local paper. It's highly competitive since they partner with the school, and I'm a long shot since I'm a freshman, but I'm hoping having real world experience makes up for it. It's also paid so holy poo poo that would rule.
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Mar 24, 2014 06:24
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Bloody Queef posted:Is this D&D? I put myself through school without student loans by working my rear end off full time at a grocery store. Sure you can say I'm fortunate that I didn't get seriously sick (oh but I got a really bad liver infection that put me out of work/school for four weeks) or you can come up with a million reasons why it wasn't actually that hard for me. But the reality is, upward mobility isn't a lie. It isn't easy, but it shouldn't be. Your personal anecdote regarding upward mobility in the USA is compelling, particularly in light of the massive weight of evidence cutting against it. Would you mind sharing more from your trove of insight? Working part-time at a grocery store won't even pay a substantial fraction of tuition at most public schools now, much less private schools. I understand that you were full-time, but that is not a tenable solution for most students. Vox Nihili fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Mar 24, 2014 |
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Mar 24, 2014 08:06
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Golden Bee posted:... Halisnacks posted:I don't see how suggesting young people are taught/appreciate labour economics and supply/demand is "corporate style handwringing". So this isn't the case with unpaid internships at nonprofits at all, but in terms of the very well paid internships at respected companies, supply/demand of # of people is not why those are so well paid. When a place like McKinsey gets 400 applications for 4 internship spots, its summer wage isn't set by supply/demand, it's set high so it can not only get a good enough intern (which it probably would with an unpaid internship) it's set there for reasons other than number of applicants v number needed. For example: maintaining prestige, getting very first pick of the litter, etc. This is also why hedge funds pay 6k for a 2 week internship etc. semicolonsrock fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Mar 24, 2014 |
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Mar 24, 2014 10:37
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Considering that the bulge brackets/MBB/hedgies etc. pay interns and graduates remarkably similar comp, it's odd to say that DD/SS isn't a concern.
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Mar 24, 2014 11:55
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semicolonsrock posted:So this isn't the case with unpaid internships at nonprofits at all, but in terms of the very well paid internships at respected companies, supply/demand of # of people is not why those are so well paid. When a place like McKinsey gets 400 applications for 4 internship spots, its summer wage isn't set by supply/demand, it's set high so it can not only get a good enough intern (which it probably would with an unpaid internship) it's set there for reasons other than number of applicants v number needed. For example: maintaining prestige, getting very first pick of the litter, etc. This is also why hedge funds pay 6k for a 2 week internship etc. Erm, it's still supply and demand - you can't look at number of applicants as the only variable. Quality, experience, skills, etc. At the risk of doing something ridiculous like comparing interns to CEOs, do you think executive comp is not bound by s/d? You could probably find thousands of people willing to do these roles (or at least have a go), but it'd be disingenuous to say that the market is not functioning by not paying some dude $20/hour to run Fortune 500 Inc even though someone would be offering to do it at that price. Edit: and this is relevant to, say, McKinsey who will want the best, most qualified intern. This person will most likely have offers from competitors or different industries and so will likely need to be compensated in a way that reflects that.
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Mar 25, 2014 08:02
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Halisnacks posted:Erm, it's still supply and demand - you can't look at number of applicants as the only variable. Quality, experience, skills, etc. At the risk of doing something ridiculous like comparing interns to CEOs, do you think executive comp is not bound by s/d? You could probably find thousands of people willing to do these roles (or at least have a go), but it'd be disingenuous to say that the market is not functioning by not paying some dude $20/hour to run Fortune 500 Inc even though someone would be offering to do it at that price. shrike82 posted:Considering that the bulge brackets/MBB/hedgies etc. pay interns and graduates remarkably similar comp, it's odd to say that DD/SS isn't a concern. Sorry, I should have been more clear: by "supply/demand of # of people is not why those are so well paid", I only meant that the number of applicants is not the determinant of salaries at top tier internships, which I think is the same thing you are saying. So, increasing the number of people who get economics degrees or who want to go into consulting or to banking probably won't change compensation at MBB/the bulge bracket much at all -- they want the 4 best interns, not 4 interns who are just really, really good. What you're saying with "McKinsey ...will want the best, most qualified intern", is exactly what I meant by "getting very first pick of the litter". Aside from this, I think that the intern wages at the bulge bracket/MBB are higher than they need to be to give the exact same quality of worker. I'm sure that even if McKinsey significantly decreased its wages for internships it could still find people just as qualified to be its interns. The reason you intern at those places is not the immediate financial payoff, it's the fact that working for a summer at Goldman or McKinsey will give you an in to a mid-high six figure job in the next few years and an eventual exit to PE or whatever. It's actually very weird how comp differs between firms. In general, you'd expect more prestigious places to not have to pay the same for internships because interns get a higher future benefit from working there. However, it seems like this applies somewhat inconsistently. For example, in my experience, really big mid-tier places like the Big 4 consulting arms pay less than MBB, while very small boutiques will usually pay substantially more. Maybe this is because the big 4 and similar large companies place less of a premium on getting the best workers, so they don't bother paying a premium for better interns/future employees? However, small boutiques who compete directly with places like MBB for clients want that same caliber, and are willing to pay the toll to compensate for their lower reputation. I also don't get why buy-side places which are letting you work in like, a PE firm, pay so much more than I banking internships, given that people usually want to end up in the former anyways. Having bounced around the process it's actually pretty odd to me how it all works out. I will maybe crosspost this in the ibanking thread actually.
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Mar 25, 2014 10:34
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Vox Nihili posted:Your personal anecdote regarding upward mobility in the USA is compelling, particularly in light of the massive weight of evidence cutting against it. Would you mind sharing more from your trove of insight? Not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but it simply requires hard work on the school and work front and getting the right employer that's willing to let you have a more fixed schedule. However, I frequently had a night class until 10pm and work at 4am the next morning. Many of my classmates did the same thing. Many also did a blend of work and loans to pay for school. These are the people in good situations after graduation that would have been able to take a non paying internship to further their career. Whereas the history majors who were on 100% loans and spent money like crazy were hosed. You just hear a lot more "I'm 100k in student loan debt and I have no job! drat this economy! Not my fault I spent money like water and picked a major with poor job prospects!" While people that came out of college in a better position than they started aren't talking about it. I'm hoping you're not an English major, because you used tenable in a strange way, unless you meant it the way it's supposed to be used, and then I'm more confused. Bloody Queef fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Mar 25, 2014 |
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Mar 25, 2014 10:53
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semicolonsrock posted:Aside from this, I think that the intern wages at the bulge bracket/MBB are higher than they need to be to give the exact same quality of worker. I'm sure that even if McKinsey significantly decreased its wages for internships it could still find people just as qualified to be its interns. The reason you intern at those places is not the immediate financial payoff, it's the fact that working for a summer at Goldman or McKinsey will give you an in to a mid-high six figure job in the next few years and an eventual exit to PE or whatever. I actually disagree with you on this. If anything, starting full-time salaries (and consequently intern salaries since they're typically pro-rated) at the bulge brackets/MBB have been stagnant for the past 5 years given the oversupply of undergrad and MBA applicants with the economy blowing up. On a related note, with strat/business development in tech/start-up land booming, I've seen a lot of analysts/associates hopping from the finance side to join start ups in search of better present and future income growth with decent work-life balance. It's something I'm particularly conscious about and interested in since I'm headed back into an MBA this year.
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Mar 25, 2014 11:19
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shrike82 posted:I actually disagree with you on this. If anything, starting full-time salaries (and consequently intern salaries since they're typically pro-rated) at the bulge brackets/MBB have been stagnant for the past 5 years given the oversupply of undergrad and MBA applicants with the economy blowing up. On a related note, with strat/business development in tech/start-up land booming, I've seen a lot of analysts/associates hopping from the finance side to join start ups in search of better present and future income growth with decent work-life balance. Well, they're definitely up from 2008 I imagine. I imagine some of the reason that they're getting stagnant is that at the same time that more MBAs are being produced, more and more companies are also devaluing MBAs -- eg L.E.K. and a bunch of other consulting firms are increasingly not requiring them. But yeah, it does seem like startups/tech are increasingly more able to offer better pay and better work/life balance. I don't totally get the value proposition of an MBA if you aren't going to a position which requires it or don't already have a prestigious/strong network from college or employment. e: though I guess those two reasons are enough to justify a lot of MBAs e2: yeah, it is a checkbox for most places, this is true. semicolonsrock fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Mar 25, 2014 |
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Mar 25, 2014 13:32
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It sounds like you're fresh from undergrad so I guess you haven't really though about MBA/management yet but it's a checkbox to tick to hit senior management at most corporates whether on the finance or consulting end.
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Mar 25, 2014 13:47
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Bloody Queef posted:Not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but it simply requires hard work on the school and work front and getting the right employer that's willing to let you have a more fixed schedule. However, I frequently had a night class until 10pm and work at 4am the next morning. So, I have a few things for you to consider. First off, if everyone elected to become an engineer or computer science major (insert other popular STEM major as needed), there would not be enough work for all of those newly-minted graduates. I personally know a good bunch of biology students who are not able to score meaningful biology jobs. At the time I went to college, doing biology was considered a "good idea" and a "growth area" by many people. Thanks to the curve system, a substantial portion of these people do not qualify for grad school to get into the programs that would make them employable. This was at a world-class university. You must realize that what you accomplished is the exception, not the rule. Most people won't be able to achieve academic results on 4 hours of sleep. Furthermore, they shouldn't have to. The education system in America is broken and exploitative. When you say, "Well, worked for me! Just don't be in the bottom 75% of idiots who Did It Wrong" you hand-wave an incredibly immense and multi-faceted problem. Most people entering college don't even have the knowledge base to MAKE informed decisions, but will gladly accept at an expensive university because they've been told it's the smart thing to do. Are they idiots because of what they've been told by their parents, peers, and authorities? I don't think so. Lastly, and most pedantically, my usage of the word "tenable" was entirely correct.
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Mar 26, 2014 02:11
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Vox Nihili posted:Are they idiots because of what they've been told by their parents, peers, and authorities? I don't think so. Going into debt to learn next-to-nothing of value and to make no money in order to "learn" by doing on average 18 hours of work a week is a decision that nobody would make without everyone acting like it's somehow a good idea. It is a decision that only an idiot would make, but we raise people to still be dependent idiots by the age at which they make that decision. No Wave fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Mar 26, 2014 |
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Mar 26, 2014 02:36
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No Wave posted:Well, yes. Idiots are made. I think it's a terrible thing that their parents, peers, and authorities made them idiots. I don't think that's what the word idiot means. I think a better description would be "ignorant." Of course, plenty of these people are simply dumb as well, and that shouldn't be ignored. My point is only that the core problem is the system itself, and blaming/namecalling the students only serves to transfer blame from the the blameworthy to the victims.
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Mar 26, 2014 03:20
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Vox Nihili posted:I don't think that's what the word idiot means. I think a better description would be "ignorant." Of course, plenty of these people are simply dumb as well, and that shouldn't be ignored. My point is only that the core problem is the system itself, and blaming/namecalling the students only serves to transfer blame from the the blameworthy to the victims.
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Mar 26, 2014 03:24
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Had an unpaid internship last summer, but it was for college credit so I actually had to pay tuition to be there. Some of the work I did was stuff I'm pretty sure benefitted the company in that it was work clients were paying for. I guess I was supposed to get critique and feedback on stuff I was doing, but that didn't really happen. What do you goons make of this, without me having to go more into detail? (Really I think all I achieved that summer was embarrassing myself, incidentally...)
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Mar 26, 2014 03:56
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No Wave posted:So by your definition of the word, who's an idiot? Hell don't go by my definition, go by the commonly-accepted and used definition of idiot: An idiot is defined as a "stupid person," generally speaking. A stupid person is someone who is not simply misguided or misinformed, but also below-average in intelligence. A stupid person would make the wrong decision even when presented with information sufficient to inform an individual of average intelligence of the correct decision. quote:Had an unpaid internship last summer, but it was for college credit so I actually had to pay tuition to be there. Some of the work I did was stuff I'm pretty sure benefitted the company in that it was work clients were paying for. I guess I was supposed to get critique and feedback on stuff I was doing, but that didn't really happen. What do you goons make of this, without me having to go more into detail? (Really I think all I achieved that summer was embarrassing myself, incidentally...) I don't know how much feedback you're going to get with such a bare-bones narrative. Did you learn any new, marketable skills? Did you develop any significant industry connections that are likely to get you a foot in the door down the road? If not, yeah, you got shafted. Vox Nihili fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Mar 26, 2014 |
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Mar 26, 2014 03:56
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No Wave posted:So by your definition of the word, who's an idiot? A If you want to hear a hilarious anecdotal story, my dad called me last month and told me about a coworker's son who graduated from Yale with a degree in applied math and can't find a job. Maybe he was an idiot for doing that!
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Mar 27, 2014 03:24
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My friends who did math at Princeton all found six figure jobs out of college working in finance. I guess my anecdote negates yours!
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Mar 27, 2014 03:51
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Peven Stan posted:A If you want to hear a hilarious anecdotal story, my dad called me last month and told me about a coworker's son who graduated from Yale with a degree in applied math and can't find a job. Maybe he was an idiot for doing that! I'm saying that any definition of idiot will be inevitably explainable by a set of circumstances. By insisting that someone making a terrible decision isn't an idiot, you're implying that there are other people who are idiots, but their decision-making process is usually quite compelling given their life circumstances and understanding of the situation. Don't get me wrong - I do think it's a total sham that school debt is non-dischargeable and that non-dischargeable debt even exists. I would prefer a country where youthful idiocy cannot lead to a lifetime of financial servitude for the profit of others. No Wave fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Mar 27, 2014 |
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Mar 27, 2014 04:35
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Vox Nihili posted:I don't know how much feedback you're going to get with such a bare-bones narrative. Did you learn any new, marketable skills? Did you develop any significant industry connections that are likely to get you a foot in the door down the road? If not, yeah, you got shafted. I would say yes to the first one (though these things move quickly and what I learned might be outdated by now) and maybe to the second one. I guess it wasn't so bad after all then.
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Mar 27, 2014 05:00
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No Wave posted:No, I think that a degree in applied math from Yale is still a good bet despite the fact that he doesn't have a job. You probably feel the same way as well. It might blow your mind that in Denmark they attempt to price gouge foreigners trying to get their master's degrees there and the onerous sum they charge for that privilege is a cool 10k euros a year. Meanwhile I know people who decided to go to the #1 social work school in the US (at washington university in stl) and came out with a 80k MSW. Of course with that degree its a total crapshoot. I've seen MSWs from that school make anything from wal-mart wages at wal-mart to being a VP of a social services "nonprofit" who on their IRS disclosures claimed to make a salary of over 100k a year.
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Mar 27, 2014 05:07
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No Wave posted:No, I think that a degree in applied math from Yale is still a good bet despite the fact that he doesn't have a job. You probably feel the same way as well. Pedantry aside, as long as you support meaningful regulation of the education-industrial complex, we're on the same page. The average 18 year-olds (not just the idiots!), armed with extremely limited information and life experience, are NEVER going to be able to make nuanced, effective choices in the face of the slick college industry and its monumental efforts at subterfuge, lobbying, etc. We should be acting to create an environment that places students where they and society will benefit most, or at least lays all the options before them in a balanced, exhaustive manner.
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Mar 27, 2014 05:29
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Vox Nihili posted:Pedantry aside, as long as you support meaningful regulation of the education-industrial complex, we're on the same page. The average 18 year-olds (not just the idiots!), armed with extremely limited information and life experience, are NEVER going to be able to make nuanced, effective choices in the face of the slick college industry and its monumental efforts at subterfuge, lobbying, etc. We should be acting to create an environment that places students where they and society will benefit most, or at least lays all the options before them in a balanced, exhaustive manner. I agree with you on the problem, 18yr olds don't really know what they are going to give and receive from a college education beyond $200k+ pf debt. The difficult part of dealing with that issue is how to fix that problem without creating new ones. Should more of the tax base go to fund a college education (where will that funding come from?), should a college education be available to fewer people or more people (How do you decide ?). Right now the system does have a great attribute in that it does provide opportunity for upward mobility to some(though those already in that top tier have a huge advantage). How do you keep the ability to reward the best/brightest/hardest working/luckiest etc.. and not bring everyone down in an effort to bring more people up? It is easy to point out the flaws in the system but every system has them and the perfect allocation of jobs to people's interests and society's needs simply can't be solved perfectly. The whole basis of economics is to try and figure out the best way to entice people to perform the work that society, some times it works most of the time it doesn't, but at least with the US system you have opportunity and a chance to move up but definitely no guarantee. Doing an internship should helpfully give that now 20 year old a dose of reality if they are going to hate their chosen field.
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#
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Mar 31, 2014 19:32
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