- the junior individual (intern, student) is doing work
- the junior individual expects to learn during the experience
- the senior entity (college, company) is expected to put effort into making sure the junior has learning opportunities
- the senior entity can expect the junior person to contribute less productivity to the company than a full employee
Now, how similar/dis-similar they are depends heavily on how much the internship focuses on the learning experience and how much the intern adds to the company.
But to say that the intern is definitely contributing more than they are gain is factually incorrect. And
> They are giving up their labor and should be compensated accordingly.
The thing is, "accordingly" is open to interpretation and, in some cases where the intern is getting a lot more than they give, it's reasonable to argue that it is "not at all".
This depends. I am a student and at my last internship I was given work that nobody really had time for but ended up (towards the end) becoming a key part of a revenue-generating, customer-facing feature. While a senior could have done the same stuff in less time, I feel like the fact that this stuff was initially something nobody at the company had time for initially provided some sort of value to the company.
And the pressure to deliver only increases when talking FAANG internships, which pay (hourly) at the same rate as a junior engineer. It seems absurd to me to pay an intern that much to deliver negative value to a team, don't you think?
I do agree, 100%. I think many interns add value and should be paid accordingly. I think many other interns cost more than the add (and gain a lot), and I can see where needing to pay them would mean they wouldn't be there at all. And I think there's a lot area between those two cases.
> This depends.
Honestly, that's all I was trying to say originally; that it depends on the situation.
> the senior entity can expect the junior person to contribute less productivity to the company than a full employee
College students don't "contribute productivity" at all, because they don't have an employer/employee relationship with the school. The work they do is entirely orthogonal to the school's revenue. This comparison fundamentally does not make sense.
If they were at college completing courses, they'd be giving up their labor towards that. If you consider an internship an educational opportunity, then the argument that they should be paid holds no water (since they don't get paid for college work, instead they pay for the experience).
Obviously, not all internships are _really_ educational opportunities, but I would expect most of them to be to at least some extent. To argue that all of them are just "the intern doing work for the employer, and the only difference is the amount of work compared to a full employee" is naive at best, and possibly disingenuous.