Bloomberg Businessweek

Law School Students Fight to Make Internships More Fair

By
September 09, 2014

Joe Zeidner’s struggle to support his family while he finishes his law degree has been exacerbated by a rule that bans law students from using paid internships toward their degrees. He has fought to change the rule, but lawyers that defend it argue that getting paid can muddy the academic value of learning on the job.

“It is patently unfair to make law students choose between getting class credit and being able to be compensated and paying their rent,” Zeidner told a meeting of the American Bar Association in August.

Zeidner, who represented the 35,000-member law student division of the American Bar Association at the meeting, hoped to defeat the ban at the August meeting, but the ABA kept the rule in place. The association won’t revise the rules governing law schools for  10 further years.

The law student division says the provision adds to their financial stress at a time when they are more indebted than ever and have few job prospects. The average law student had $140,000 in debt in 2012, up from about $88,000 in 2004, according to the New America Foundation. In February, the employment rate for new law graduates reached its lowest point in six years, falling to 84.5 percent.

Zeidner’s situation illustrates how the rule can affect the lives of law students. The 35-year-old has $150,000 in student debt and has been receiving food stamps since enrolling at Drexel University School of Law in 2012. He supports his wife and their 3-year-old daughter, and the three live at the home of his wife’s parents in Philadelphia.

This summer, Zeidner says, he wrestled with the choice to take an unpaid internship for credit over a paying job as a line cook. The job promised a sorely needed paycheck, but the internship would provide the credit he needed to graduate six months early.

Opting for the job, Zeidner says, “would mean about six months more debt. It would also mean six months longer until I could find a job as an attorney and start paying off my student loan.” He chose the internship.

About half of the 1,900 law students polled by the ABA’s law student division last October said they “had to decide between taking a non-paying externship and a paying, law-related job/internship,” at some point, according to the ABA.

Monalisa Dugué, a 42-year-old student at Valparaiso University Law School, took an unpaid internship this summer at a charity providing legal services immigrants so she could earn 3 academic credits. But Dugué, who is the mother of a 9-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl, says she had to cut the internship short “because it became too expensive” to work for free.

“I couldn’t even afford to put food in the refrigerator,” she says, “I have two school-age kids that I also had to provide for. For me it was a bigger burden.”

Dugué received a small stipend, but she says it didn’t cover most of her rent, transportation and food costs.

Law school is already out of reach for many low-income students, Dugué says. “To ask the students to, on top of that, do an internship and not get paid for it, I think that’s just ludicrous,” Dugué says. “The ABA should do better.”

The ABA did make some changes in its August meeting to lessen the burden for struggling students, like getting rid of a rule that limited students to working 20 hours of paid work per week. Over the next year, the group within the ABA that sets industry standards will consider law students’ demands to revise the paid externship rule, and could overturn it by the time the ABA has it’s next annual meeting in August 2015. But for now the ban remains in effect.

“No one is unsympathetic to the students who end up graduating from law school with a lot of debt,” says Barry Currier, managing director of accreditation and legal education at the ABA. But Currier says that some at the ABA questioned whether students would be able to reap the educational value of clinical experience if they were getting paid for it.

“Some people would say there are conflicts that are difficult to resolve if a student is both working for the employer, and also under some requirements from the school,” says Currier. “No one pays you to go to class. You pay for the educational experience, and maybe its just best to leave it that way.”

But Cathleen Nine-Altevogt, a student at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law, says that working for a paycheck involves just as much learning as working for free. Nine-Altevogt has a paid job as a clerk at the Indiana Attorney General’s Office that doesn’t offer academic credit, but that she says requires her to engage with the law in a deeply practical way. “It’s certainly not fetching coffee, or fetching copies,” she says.

Nine-Altevogt, who is 26, once had a so-called externship to earn credit, but says that the arrangement didn’t seem fair.

“You are paying as if it’s a class, because it is a class, but instead of being the traditional student you are going into a company or an agency and performing job duties,” she says, “so you’re basically paying the school to work.”

For now, it looks as though the line between paying for a legal education and working for free will remain blurry for a long time.

Kitroeff is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York, covering business education.