"Kids need to put their bottom line first, just like employers do." - Absolutely - and you don't think they do? Are they better off to have been denied the choice? Why didn't those unpaid interns quit? Could it possibly be that they made the conscious choice that their time spent doing these tasks was better than not at all (or working in fast food or whatever other job for that matter)?

What were they promised?

Ahh, good question! 3 college credits for ~250 hours. That's the incentive. One did it just for the experience, and regretted it.

And they probably paid for those college credits. A typical state school might put that at $900 bucks. Great deal huh?

The unpaid internship thing is often a scam to get people to do just the kind of work you're describing. In companies I've worked for, I've seen it done.

I saw interns manually 'cleaning' data in a way that could be entirely automated. I told my employer at the time that they'd never be able to keep up with new incoming data and it's terrible, pointless work. I also said I could automate it in about 20 hours of work. He said, "we'll put an ad in for more interns."

Young people are naive, it's part of being young. It's unscrupulous to take advantage of that. Cuban could have paid internships paying at minimum wage if he'd like. It would still be far less expensive than getting actual professionals to do that work. His real complaint should be that he can't extract any real value for that work from the marketplace, because that's where his real problem is.

Did they get what they were promised?

If so . . . where's the problem? Is it that people just assumed they'd get more than they were promised?