As a film major-turned-journalism student, I’m used to having money problems. This isn’t a new situation for someone my age — just look at railway apprentices in 1940s Portland, Oregon. Some of these guys didn’t earn any cash for their grueling labor as entry-level brakemen — and that was OK, according to the 1947 Walling v. Portland Terminal Co. Supreme Court ruling that labeled them “trainees” instead of legitimate employees.
If this sounds like a prototypical unpaid internship, that’s because Walling laid the legal groundwork for the 38 percent of US interns who continue to jump at such “opportunities.” Paid internship hiring is on the rise nationwide, according to the 2025 National Association of Colleges and Employers Student Survey, but in Massachusetts, unpaid ones still abound for those who receive “school or academic credit” or training similar to that of an “educational environment.”
Due to my career choice probably being the lowest-paying after Times Square Elmo, I’ve gotten quite familiar with this type of agreement. And my Emerson College classmates and I are constantly reminded by professors and future employers that we’re entering dying industries.
“Journalism is doomed,” Jason Pramas, executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, tells me. “A lot of us keep doing it out of duty. . . . But we’re not doing it because we expect to get rich and famous.”
Does this stop us from chasing our dreams? Of course not.
Employers want experienced applicants, and we want experience. The National Association of Colleges and Employers surveys job recruiters annually about what they look for in candidates. “Every year, among the top three or four factors . . . they’re looking for internship experience on the résumé,” says Joshua Kahn, associate director of research and public policy.
Forget about self-care. A U.S. News & World Report survey published in January found my generation prioritizes “job opportunities over financial compensation or work-life balance.” Last summer, thirst for experience led me to accept an unpaid internship at an independent radio station, where I sacrificed income for the chance at a big break in broadcasting.
Ultimately, my time emailing contest winners helped me get hired months later at GBH News as a paid intern. But this fall, I may be returning to square one: I’ll be studying at Emerson’s Los Angeles program (where working an internship is required) and career counselors recently informed my cohort we’ll likely be doing unpaid internships — in one of the nation’s most expensive cities.
This is where the concept of free labor morphs into a strange paradox. Though I bunked at home last summer with parents who covered my living expenses, I was technically employed illicitly — I never bothered submitting my work at that unpaid internship for academic credit. At Emerson, my 50-hour “professional development experience” would have earned me 1 credit and cost over $1,000 in tuition (more for fall and spring semesters).
Add that tuition to the other hundreds of thousands in tuition and housing — along with the money I wasn’t earning at my radio job — and it simply didn’t feel worth it to go into more debt.
As I prepare to graduate this December, a new series of financial pressures has emerged: the ongoing gas crisis, rising food prices, and a historically poor job market. If we’re expected to work unpaid for several months — which, according to the 2025 NACE Student Survey, leads to fewer job offers and lower salaries than for those who complete paid internships — how are we expected to survive an economy that’s tailor-made to fail young people?
One of my peers, Iselin Bratz, a journalism senior from Maine who supports herself financially, says she would find it hard to do unpaid work, “particularly for an internship that’s in a city that’s not where I live.” Though she completed an unpaid internship last fall at local nonprofit news outlet Cambridge Day, she was only able to afford the opportunity because of a grant from Emerson’s “hyperlocal news initiative.”
Some companies don’t have the funds to pay a salary but find ways to help cover students’ cost of living. “I think in any way that places can partner with schools to have grants or [offer] a stipend . . . then that’s always better,” Bratz says.
Even the railway brakemen who lost out in Walling v. Portland Terminal Co., which set the guidelines for a very specific type of blue-collar educational experience, only trained without pay for seven to eight days and were compensated $4 per day retroactively. Nobody expected them to have an undergraduate degree, or even if they had, tuition at Harvard only cost $525 in 1947 — equal to roughly $8,000 now.
Today, the Department of Labor defines an unpaid intern as anybody who “complements, rather than displaces” the work done by full-time, paid workers without ever defining what “complement” means. This can create an atmosphere of exploitation rather than education. One classmate told me about being left to run a company’s entire PR strategy with two other unpaid interns — in the middle of their final exams.
And discrimination and other ethical problems can be rampant.
“There are labor laws that unpaid internships run into trouble with,” Kahn says. “For example, unpaid interns are not protected from harassment in the workplace because they’re not considered employees.”
I know unpaid internships can lead to jobs. The business manager at my unpaid internship told me she had one as a student and it “blossomed into a career.”
But maybe the perfect happy medium, for smaller companies and nonprofits
that need all the help they can get, lies in the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism model. There, Pramas and his team bring on 30 interns a semester and pay them $150 each for one story, even though the organization only has “money until August.”
Though they can’t guarantee anything more than that, Pramas believes “respect” and “karma” are just as important as overhead. So is “remembering what it’s like to be young, to be treated badly,” he says. “It would be good to remember that and then to go, ‘What’s the best we can possibly do?’ Even if it means that we suffer somewhat.”
Charlie Desjardins is a journalism student at Emerson College. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.