Fee for placement internship opportunities?!? I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you!!

The now defunct NPR program, Day to Day, recently ran a story on the practice of paying for summer internship placements, Really Want That Internship? Pay Up.

Now, to anyone who has looked for international internships over the last few years this will come as no great surprise. Third-party providers have come to dominate international placements; and the results of a Google search for international placements of any sort are clogged with them.

It can be a mind-numbing, frustrating, and more than a little discouraging experience. "Pay to play" seems to be the order of the day.

There is assistance available. Here at UW-Madison the Letters & Science Career Services office coordinates the Henderson-Reznick Family and Shinners Family Summer Internship Scholarships -- a $5,000 award (deadline this year is 31 March 2009). Since that link might disappear after the deadline an archived copy of the application is available on Go Global! servers.

As seems to be implied in the Day to Day piece (and as many of the comments on the story explicitly assert) the idea of paying for an internship (let alone a volunteer placement -- as is the norm now for international placements) is an uncomfortable one: and as it becomes commonplace, these very limited -- albeit generous -- financial assistance packages do little to address the larger questions of access and equity.

This is, by far, the most pressing question and concern of the students interested in working internationally who come by for advising. And there's just not a lot that can be done. It's a fact of life: money buys access.

There has been some pushback and there are some resources available -- with a focus on volunteer opportunities (though in my experience, the distinction between "intern" and "volunteer" is more of historical interest than significant nowadays). Interestingly, much of it has been focused in Latin America, where there are a few websites that emphasize low to no-cost opportunities:

• Volunteer South America

• IndependentVolunteer.org
• Volunteer Abroad

• Volunteer Latin America (purchase "custom" listings -- there are similar programs for other regions, such as Volunteer4Africa)

There are, of course, the old work horses such as World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) though here you're getting more into the realm of short-term work opportunities, something I'll be tackling in more detail later (with WWOOF too, as with Volunteer Latin America and others, you buy access to information for a small fee).

There are also new social media sites that are worth exploring -- such as SE7EN and TrekShare. Whether either of these will have legs is anyone's guess at the moment.

I would say "the more the merrier" but with the raw, ham-fisted power of Google and the rather limited ability to sift and winnow and focus both of existing tools and many of those looking for opportunities, it will continue, I think, to be a question of finding those live bodies who can direct you to the better, "hidden" treasures.

Or just buy your way in.

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The land of milk and honey: not so sweet and nourishing anymore?

Interesting but in many respects unsurprising is a recent column by Vivek Wadhwa on BusinessWeek.com titled "Why Skilled Immigrants Are Leaving the U.S." Wadhwa and a team at Duke University have done some research showing that foreign workers coming to the United States (and students who come to study and stay to work) are increasingly heading home.

There is, of course, the much lamented and discussed wait period to secure the necessary permits and visas (the dreaded H1-B) to blame. But Wadhwa also points to another factor in many instances: the fact that these workers can enjoy a better quality of life in their home country than they currently enjoy in the United States.

Now, milk and honey is not slurped uncut anywhere anymore:

It isn't all rosy back home. Indians complained of traffic and congestion, lack of infrastructure, excessive bureaucracy, and pollution. Chinese complained of pollution, reverse culture shock, inferior education for children, frustration with government bureaucracy, and the quality of health care. Returnees said they were generally making less money in absolute terms, but they also said they enjoyed a higher quality of life.

But, still, in surveys Wadhwa and his team found that:

Eighty-seven percent of Chinese and 79% of Indians said a strong factor in their original decision to return home was the growing demand for their skills in their home countries.

This certainly points to expanding labor markets (these expansions might not hold through the current downturn -- what expansions are? -- though one would imagine as the world economies pick back up these expansions will as well). It's not at all clear, however, what corollaries or lessons we can draw for US students interested in working abroad. I doubt that these labor markets are, in most instances, developed enough to begin to absorb excess labor (as the US economy has done -- has depended upon -- for years and years).

One thing that it does mean, for every graduate of any particular US institution of higher education (and perhaps mostly especially for those larger schools like the UW-Madison which have tremendous international student populations), is that there will be more and more alumni of your alma mater in country with whom to network.

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