Getting paid to learn isn't a perk. It's the point.
Why unpaid internships quietly filter out the students who need them most.
Ask a room full of executives how many of them did unpaid internships. Most will raise their hand. Ask them how many of their kids will do unpaid internships. Same answer.
Now ask which students in the country can afford a summer of unpaid work in a city they'd have to move to. The list gets short fast.
The invisible filter
The unpaid internship isn't neutral. It's a filter, and it filters exactly the students who would benefit most from being in the room. If you have to work a paying job over the summer to help your family, the prestige internship isn't on the table.
The result is that entry-level pipelines quietly homogenize. Not because anyone is trying to make them that way. Because the economics of unpaid work do it for them.
What paying students changes
When students get paid to participate, three things change immediately. The applicant pool widens. The attendance rate goes up. And, less obviously, the students take the work more seriously. Getting paid is a signal that the work matters. Students respond to that signal.
The counter-argument, addressed
The usual pushback is that paying students turns learning into labor. Maybe. Or maybe it just refuses to pretend that a young person's time is worth nothing. We've never met a 17-year-old whose time is worth nothing.
We pay students in our cohorts. Not because it's generous. Because it's the only way the door stays open to every student who should walk through it.