THOUSANDS PAYING TUITION FEES TO GO OUT AND WORK FOR NOTHING
Did you work for free as part of your degree course?
Graduate Fog is receiving a growing number of complaints from students who feel the work placements they are doing as part of their course are too long, exploitative and should be paid. Many are also questioning why they are paying tuition fees to their university, only to be sent out to work unpaid for a private company for up to a year, just because it’s part of a so-called ‘placement’.
Several of you have suggested that your university may be trying to find a way to cut its costs whilst also boosting your institution’s precious ’employability’ stats.
While you’re keen to make yourself as employable as possible too, you raise the point that you could go out and find your own job, which you would actually get paid for, rather than paying to do. So what value is your university really adding here?
For four years, Graduate Fog has campaigned for graduate internships to be paid at least the minimum wage – and we are starting to win this fight. But we have tended to leave student internships alone. There are several reasons for that.
First, they are legal – the minimum wage law has an exemption for students doing internships as part of their course.
Even if it looks very much like a job, if it counts in some way as credit for your degree, it is legal. We have never thought that was fair (if your work is valuable to the organisation, why should it matter whether you’re a student or not?) but there it is.
Second, this website is called Graduate Fog, not Student Fog – so we thought we’d leave that fight to someone else.
But we’re concerned that nobody seems to be picking it up. And things seem to be getting worse – some students tell us they have worked for a year unpaid, whilst simultaneously paying tuition fees to their university. That’s right – they’re paying their university while they go out and work for a private employer for free.
Is anyone else starting to feel quite annoyed about this? And has anyone heard from the NUS on this subject? What about any other student body or big website?. Is anyone doing anything? If so, we’d love to share with them what we’ve learned about the campaign for fairer graduate internships as it could be helpful in a new fight too.
So today we have three questions for you:
1) What do you think about student internships – is it right that long, unpaid work placements should be legal if they’re part of your course – or should the law be tightened to protect students against exploitation?
2) Is this a fight that you think someone should take on? Are students getting angry about what’s happening – and would they support a campaign to improve the situation?
3) Have you heard whether the NUS or any other body is doing anything about it?
Please comment below – we’d love to hear what you think…
A good example is the British Legislative Studies course at Hull University.
If you want to be an MP’s bag carrier the best route is applying for this four year course at Hull (yes — No Blackadder jokes!) that contains a year in Parliament learning the ropes.
Yes it is absurd that you are effectively paying to train yourself but on the plus side it means you actually get taken seriously when applying for entry level jobs. With unemployment at 2.5m can you really put a price on that?
The reality is that employers do not want to train entry level staff. Entry level staff are a burden as they take time to learn the ropes. Who wants to be a burden?
In the only University I’ve worked at that had a significant proportion of these ‘sandwich’ courses, with a year-long placement in the third year of a four year degree, it generally worked well. Placements were usually beneficial for both parties and, crucially, paid. (Not at the level that a graduate would earn with the same company, but certainly above minimum wage.) It also gave a real boost to the students’ chances of getting a job after graduation, often with the same company they’d done their sandwich year with. On the whole though, this only really held true for certain types of course – the Sciences, Engineering disciplines, some of the Management degrees etc – whereas for other courses – Psychology, English Lit for example – it was harder. There were fewer placements available and those that could be found were often unpaid, or paid below minimum wage. There were still advantages for the students’ learning and employability, but these came alongside obvious financial disadvantages.
With regard to the tuition fee, I don’t know if this is the same for all Unis, but students paid a reduced fee for the sandwich year. Obviously a Uni still has some costs to cover – assessment, administration of the placement process, usually they’d be at least one tutor visit to the student during the placement etc. I don’t know if the Uni made a profit on the year (I suspect it did) but I imagine this was used to cross-subsidise other less-profitable areas of activity, just as Unis cross-subsidise in other areas.
I don’t think I’d want to see a change in the law, as the placements can provide such valuable learning, but Unis need to be responsible and ensure they are only offering placements on courses where the student is going to get a genuine benefit. The danger, as you identify in your article, is that these placements become devalued and seen as an easy cash-cow for hard-up Universities with no real value for the student. If Universities can’t act responsibly to ensure this doesn’t happen, then regulation will be needed to force their hand.
ACareersAdviser is right to say universities should monitor the quality of their sandwich placements and only offer them where they’re likely to provide the students with real benefits. I think students need to look after their own interests too.
The obvious time to check out the quality of the sandwich placements offered is when students are deciding which universities to apply for.
As “customers” paying up to £9K in tuition fees alone, they’ve every riqht to quiz universities for information on the types of work and projects undertaken by students in their sandwich year; the percentages of employers taking on students who had sandwich placements with them to do “career” jobs; and the amount of tutor oversight given during these placements. Ask what support the university gave when sandwich placements went wrong in the past and how quickly were problems resolved.