Auctioning Internships
May 26, 2010 by Kathy McManus
“This seems wrong,” writes Baltimore Sun blogger Jay Hancock, about plum student internships being sold to the highest bidders at a charity auction. In this case, the money raised supports the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, Hancock says, “But it’s still adding another layer to Auction America, where everything is available for a price.”
That price, Yahoo News reported, was $42,500 for an auctioned internship at Vogue magazine, $9,000 for the winning bid to “jump-start” your son or daughter’s career “in the blogosphere by way of the Huffington Post,” and $2,900 for a two-week internship “strolling the rarefied halls at Vanity Fair.”
The Wall Street Journal calls auctioned internships “intangibles” that “even the wealthiest parents can’t normally secure for their kids.” At a private school auction in Manhattan, The Journal reports, “parents had the chance to help their kids bypass the interview process and purchase a summer internship at Bobbi Brown Cosmetics.” Starting bid: $6,000
Internships used to be “a way for companies to give back (and) help bright young people launch into the real world,” laments the Sun’s Hancock. Now he says, an elite auctioned internship is even “worse” than working for free because “you pay them.”
Does selling internships to the highest bidders give winners an unfair advantage?
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3 Comments
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May 27, 2010 by Don Young
Sure it gives the wealthy an advantage. in that the auctioning off of the internships is an unfair advantage, the wealthy always had some advantage, they might have been better able to afford to to do well in the selection process, with better education and contacts that could have helped them to know what they needed to concentrate on.
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August 12, 2010 by Ashiera James
Im interested in a marketing interships abroad in Australia in the summer of 2010.
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April 28, 2011 by Lynn Clarke
As a certified educator, I have witnessed first hand how children, depending on their geographical location, parents income bracket or district resources are already having opportunities taken away from them. Children especially should have an even playing field. When we as a society think it's ok to have lotteries and auctions for educational opportunities something is seriously wrong!
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