unpaid internships are a scam.
it’s a sort of voluntary slave labor. they aren’t even really allowed to do anything expect fetch coffee or make photocopies and such.
these do not exist in the real world. they only exist in the fake worlds of entertainment, fashion, and politics.
http://www.mybudget360.com/unpaid-internships-black-swan-internship-trends/
when i had an intern on one of my engineering projects some years back, he was actually made part of the project, contributed, learned, and was paid!
Where I am, “interns” are paid, and are allowed to observe and contribute to projects. This might help or might hurt the project, it costs something, but the company probably views it as an investment to attract and keep the best people from the local schools. This is the way “internships” were supposed to work, I believe.
I will bet that in “soft sciences” like journalism and politics, the real purposes of internships is to give the 30/40-something liberals access to an unlimited, always-fresh supply of young starry-eyed co-eds.