Northwestern rethinks mandatory unpaid internship program

• Journalism students are required to pay tuition in exchange for a three-month%2C unpaid internship.
• Students receive around %24900 to relocate to their internships and some receive a %242.72/hr stipend.
• Northwestern is reconsidering the program and some internship sites will begin to pay students.

Prestige doesn't pay the bills.

Yet students at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism are left with few options due to a mandatory degree requirement known as the Residency Program, a recent Propublica investigation reveals.

During the three-month Residency Program, journalism students leave traditional classes and move across the country to work at prestigious internships like CNN Documentaries or Conde Nast Traveler, reporter Kara Brandeisky writes.

Northwestern students pay $15,040 for the quarter's tuition in exchange for a full-time, "substantive" unpaid internship. The internship sites directly pay Medill $1,250 for each unpaid student placed at their company, yet students only receive about $900 for relocation expenses and — at most — a stipend of $2.72 an hour.

But as unpaid interns across the country file more and more high-profile lawsuits, both Medill and the internship sites are beginning to reconsider the arrangement, according to an e-mail they sent to the internship sites on July 30.

"Some sites … have told Medill that their legal counsel require them to pay a student either in addition to the $1,250 or in lieu of the $1,250 to reflect the company's own hiring policies that address this law," program coordinator Desiree Hanford wrote.

Hanford wrote that Medill was "careful to make sure" that the program meets U.S. Department of Labor regulations and asked if the internship sites would consider beginning to pay the students.

"With this backdrop, Medill would like to know whether you would be willing to pay a student who is doing a residency at your site and, if so, how much you would be willing to pay?" Hanford asked. "Would you be willing to pay your state's minimum wage?"

Fifteen news organizations have started to pay their Medill interns and around 18 others said they would consider it, Hanford told Propublica.

One such organization was WGEM, a television station in Western Illinois owned by Quincy Broadcast Print Interactive.

All Medill interns work as "a typical member of the news department team" and produce content at WGEM, said Jena Schulz, director of human resources for Quincy.

From a legal standpoint, she says, only paid interns can do substantive work like that.

"We believe it is necessary for us to treat the interns as actual employees — and pay them — in order for them to receive the full benefit of the experience," Schulz said. "Our company has operated by the letter of the law and said if the interns are anything other than in your way, they probably don't qualify as unpaid."

Gina Neff, associate professor of communication at the University of Washington, estimates that 10% of internships benefit students academically even though almost all journalism schools have internship programs.

"We've held up a class of jobs that are 'the internship,' that are typically unpaid or underpaid," Neff told Propublica. "I would call on more professors to stand up and take notice that we're in effect complicit in a system that is underpaying student labor."