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This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
At the nursing home where Alejandra Luis, 23, works, she spends time seeing clients, working on referrals and discharges, doing client assessments, and doing computer work like keeping notes on client charts. Her placement there and the work that comes with it is a requirement of her master’s in social work program and that labor is unpaid.
Recently, the social worker on staff retired, so now Luis and another staff member share a lot of those responsibilities, too. Luis is living at home with her parents, roughly an hour's commute from the campus where she’s pursuing a master’s degree in social work, and is the first high school and college graduate in her family. She can’t afford to live alone.
Luis meticulously budgeted gas money for the entire semester, knowing she can’t drive any more than those allocated funds allow. She has no health insurance and had to stop seeing her therapist. Attending classes and working at the nursing home didn’t leave enough hours to squeeze in her day job at a bank, so she’s living off student loans and credit cards and will graduate with roughly $90,000 in student loan debt. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to pay it off.
Despite the knowledge that unpaid internships deepen inequities across fields and there is ongoing advocacy to end them, there are entire fields, including education, social work, and nursing, where unpaid labor is often built into the structure of the field from the outset. The requirement for coursework that is supposed to ensure hands-on work experience fails to take into account the economic realities for students.
According to Payment for Placements (P4P), a movement across university campuses calling for social work students to be paid for fieldwork, 88% of internships for a master’s in social work at the University of Michigan — where Payment for Placements was founded — were unpaid. P4P members on the University of Georgia’s campus conducted a survey of 100 social work students and found that 90% don’t receive compensation for fieldwork. In April, P4P held a national week of action, calling attention to the financial issues and distress experienced by impacted students.
While Payment for Placements focuses on social work, students in a variety of professions are advocating for changes to the expectation of unpaid labor with an eye toward making these jobs more accessible. These students say economic hardship shouldn’t be a prerequisite for entering their fields of choice.
One of the reasons Luis wanted to be a social worker, she tells Teen Vogue, is what she sees as a lack of representation for Hispanic social workers. “There are a lot of Hispanic clients on the other end, who need people who understand the culture and understand the language and just understand their lived experiences.” She wishes there was substantially more diversity in her field, and explains, “That's currently not possible because if you are asking Black, brown, [and] Indigenous people to come into this field, you're essentially asking them to take on a commitment to have lifelong debt.”
“If you are a parent, if you have a family, if you have to have a job, if you’re poor, if you're disabled, it's so difficult to get into the field of social work,” says Elise Colquitt, 24, co-chair of P4P at the University of Georgia. (Her school is currently leading national P4P efforts; the leadership rotates quarterly.) Some programs discourage students from having outside jobs since it adds to their level of stress, Colquitt tells Teen Vogue. She was given advice to pick up shifts at a restaurant, for example, but that option isn’t feasible, because she’s disabled. It’s not a solution to the expectation of unpaid labor and it's a suggestion given with able-bodied students in mind.
To Colquitt, unpaid labor defines the field even later on: “They can be offered the lowest salary,” she says of people moving into social work positions after they get their degrees. “And they will be excited to take it because it's more than what they've been making.” Having students compensated for their fieldwork would impact them positively on an individual level, Colquitt adds, but it would also have a positive impact on the entire field as well.
Carlos Mark Vera, the cofounder of Pay Our Interns, which has supported Payment for Placements, notes the connection between unpaid labor and the student debt crisis. Some states require multiple degrees in order to enter fields like social work and teaching and then graduates receive salaries that barely allow them to make ends meet. Many of these fields are already shaped by systemic pay inequities related to race and gender and it’s well-documented that unpaid internships exacerbate racial wealth gaps. “People are taking out student loans to do these practicums and fieldwork,” continues Vera, “and oftentimes, that's actually where they accrue their student debt. Then you're graduating [and] you're making just a little bit above the poverty line.”
Sustained organizing against unpaid work requirements comes at a time of shortages in teaching, nursing and health care, social work, counseling, and more in the midst of burnout, underpayment, and understaffing. Potential student loan debt forgiveness remains clenched in the hands of the Supreme Court. And the payment pause is officially ending, meaning that student loan payments and interest will resume. Meanwhile, students are often paying universities to complete required unpaid work hours: Since the hours are required credits, students are paying tuition for them.
In addition to forcing students who cannot afford to work without getting paid (primarily those from marginalized communities), out of fields they may want to enter, these work requirements could be considered a form of coercion, Erin Hatton, PhD, a professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo-SUNY, tells Teen Vogue.
“This unpaid labor requirement is like the gatekeeping function,” Dr. Hatton says. “They have to do this in order to embark on a career.” The fact that these jobs are construed as “education” rather than “work” means students lack protections they would have as employees, including the right to be part of a union and not be subject to discrimination, harassment, or unsafe working conditions, Dr. Hatton explains. “Even when working to learn is also an investment in your future, that does not justify not being paid for your labor.” It's taken a lot of student activism and organizing to fight for change, Dr. Hatton adds, “and they're still fighting."
In social work, Payment for Placements has founded 40 chapters at schools across the country, each working within the parameters of their school and state to serve students. The Michigan chapter of P4P played a pivotal role in legislation passed to pay graduate students in public colleges and universities who are studying social work, psychology, and counseling, $25 an hour for up to 20 hours a week of fieldwork.
In other professions, similar efforts are underway: In 2022, Colorado passed a bill that provides stipends to student teachers. And in Maryland, student teachers like Jailyn Bridgeforth, 21, are working to get state laws passed that would compensate student teachers, according to reporting from the National Education Association
Asked about the toll unpaid labor has taken on her well-being, Bridgeforth points out you can hear it in her voice — she’s sick. In addition to her student teaching workload, Bridgeforth has an on-campus job as a resident assistant, for which her compensation is room and board. She’s up by 5 a.m., and the school day begins at 7:30 a.m. After the school day ends at 2:30, she’s back on campus, juggling responsibilities for the organizations she’s part of, then working her RA desk hours from 7:30 p.m. till midnight, followed by any homework she has until about 2 a.m. Recently, Bridgeforth says, she was awakened by a delivery person knocking because she’d fallen asleep at her desk.
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“You feel so defeated at the end of every day,” Bridgeforth tells Teen Vogue. She counts herself lucky that she has friends who support her; they’ll cook her dinner because they know she’s hungry. She’s had to fund a new professional wardrobe. “The financial toll it takes is so immense that it's pushing people out of the profession before they're even teachers,” she says.
As a first-generation college student, she also has about $65,000 of student loan debt. When she was growing up, her family “existed in poverty,” Bridgeforth tells Teen Vogue, and she heard much about going to college, getting a degree, and doing better. But without truly breaking down economic barriers, there is no way out, Bridgeforth says. “There are just different forms of poverty.”
This hits her hardest when she thinks of her fifth graders and the encouragement they’re given. “It hurts so bad,” she says. “You're telling these kids don't fall into this, don't feel defeated by your circumstances. There's more,” she explains, “but it feels like you're leading them toward a trapdoor that they're gonna fall through.”
Bridgeforth is determined to change that. She worked closely with the Maryland State Education Association to pass the Maryland Educator Shortage Act of 2023, which gives $20,000 stipends to aspiring educators in the state who are student teaching. She believes it will increase diversity in classrooms, both in terms of who can go to college and who returns to the classroom as a teacher.
The law took effect on July 1 — after Jailyn has graduated. She’s been working for this and sacrificing, she says, so that her little sister, who also wants to be an educator, can go to college and embrace the breadth of that experience while being paid for her labor and not panicking about where her next meal will come from.
There are solutions that could ensure choosing a certain career path doesn’t come with a guarantee of economic struggle. Vera of Pay Our Interns says there are three potential routes and that a one-size-fits-all solution may not work, depending on the state and institution. There’s public policy, Vera says, in which the state provides a stipend to students, and, in turn, students work for the state upon graduation. Next, Vera points to public-private partnerships, where foundations, universities, and employers create a program for funding. And finally, the employer could pay the interns.
“I think the solution is to give people money directly,” Vera says. “And no more workshops, classes. Nope. Give people money.” And that includes the organizers: “You have organizers doing this work, but they don't have resources,” Vera says. Unpaid work in an effort to end unpaid work adds up.
Student organizers say they value the work they do in the field and that’s why they’re fighting so hard to prevent economic hardship for those who come after them.
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