Counseling Interns Should Be Paid
Debt is the cost of compassion
In 2024, the average graduate with a masters degree will walk away from school with nearly $84,000 in debt. And that is just how much they will have borrowed, not how much they’ll end up paying. Since it usually takes folks 30 years to pay off loans over $60,000, at an interest rate of roughly 6%, average master’s degree borrowers will end up paying around $186,000 before their loans are paid off.
May I say, politely:
Fuck that. The burden of entering a helping profession should not be so immense.
Before we go further, let’s intercept the most common rebuttals to criticisms of the state of student debt:
“If you can’t afford it don’t go to school! And if you do go to school, choose something that pays well!”
If only it were that simple.
First, what would happen to helping professions like counseling if the majority of interested folks never got into the field? We’d have a deficit of counselors and related paraprofessionals, which means that our mental health crisis would get even worse. Second, what if income isn’t the primary motivation for one’s career? Should altruistic folks be punished for not choosing the highest paying careers? Shouldn’t it be feasible for folks to enter the mental health field without incurring life-altering debt? Should only those with generational wealth be allowed to become counselors? What kind of society are we building, if the helpers are punished for helping? Should debt be the cost of compassion?
The point is, most counselors have a great burden to bear, just so that they can pursue a helping career (and a needed one). Unfortunately, this problem probably isn’t changing anytime soon. So, what do we do?
Well, for starters, maybe we can try to resolve a smaller, but related problem for new counselors: unpaid internships.
What’s one more burden?
To complete a counseling master’s program, one must finish the academic work of a graduate degree alongside a practicum and/or internship. Though the requirements differ, internships usually involve working as a counselor, having a caseload of clients, and making money for an organization. In these roles, students function like a licensed counselor, just with more oversight.
Usually, these internships are not paid.
The common argument for unpaid internships is that interns are getting paid in experience, training, and fulfilling their hours requirements. Though I understand that these things are valuable, and that new practitioners should not be paid as much as experts, I can’t agree that unpaid internships for skilled practitioners make sense in 2024. Here are a few reasons:
Counseling students are already financially burdened. We are already taking out tens of thousands of dollars in debt to do this work, and on top of that, we are asked to perform labor for free. In my cohort, many of us had to rely on more loans to get through internship, because it was not possible to balance internship and our jobs. Why are we asked to sacrifice even more of our income, when the cost of entry is already so steep?
Intern counselors are skilled laborers. Even if students are learning on the job, they are coming into internship with specialized knowledge and skillsets. Unpaid internships make the most sense if interns do not have the required skills to perform the work. In many cases, counseling interns quickly become skilled and do meaningful work with clients, even without being licensed.
Financial barriers to education prevent racial justice. White households hold significantly more wealth than other ethnicities in the US. This means that programs that require financial sacrifices, such as unpaid internships, will affect students of color much more than white students. The mental health profession will remain predominantly operated by white people, for white people, unless these institutional barriers are erased.
Interns make money for their organizations. I have seen agencies charge as much as $100/hour for sessions with intern counselors. If the intern produces a service that is so valuable, then why would the intern not deserve some of that money? Shouldn’t labor be unpaid only if it adds little to no value?
The burden of systemic problems should not fall upon the most vulnerable. Many mental health organizations that struggle to make a profit rely on interns’ free labor to pad their margins. If institutional problems with insurance, organizational structures, and our healthcare system are making business difficult, why are the folks with the least amount of power bearing that burden? Executives, owners, and C-suite leaders have more disposable income, yet keeping organizations afloat often falls upon lower-paid employees and interns who are asked to do more work for free. Financial sacrifice should not be pushed onto those who are already struggling to make ends meet.
Debt leads to burnout. As if we need studies to prove this, debt is a contributing factor to mental health challenges and burnout. Counselors, more so than many professionals, need to be protected from burnout, as their work is so taxing. If we are expected to enter this inherently challenging field of work with the wheels of burnout already greased, then how can we be expected to do good work? How can we be expected to stay healthy when we are under-resourced?
The cost of living crisis erases the feasibility of unpaid internships. Unpaid internships have a long history in education, but in previous decades, it was easier to pay for basic necessities and housing. If income for recent grads has not kept up with the historic cost of living increase (it hasn’t), then why are we expecting students to bare the burdens that were only feasible 20 years ago? Surely, many universities have the ability to minimize these barriers for students (if university presidents’ salaries are any indication), so why aren’t resources being shifted towards those in need?
Even a little money is important. If I was paid the local minimum wage during my 9 month internship, I would have made close to $5,000. That isn’t enough to radically alter my life, but it would have certainly been enough to pay for groceries and some other expenses during that time. That money could be the difference between scraping by and functioning somewhat comfortably for students.
Unpaid internships violate the spirit of our work. As counselors, we study and understand how institutional problems and historic injustices lead to suffering for disadvantaged people. When our own organizations maintain barriers that prevent equity and ask early-stage clinicians to become burned out before they even get started, we violate the very spirit of the work we are doing. We advocate for dismantling broken and inequitable systems on one hand, while propping them up with the other.
So what do we do?
There are challenges at many levels that make it difficult to wean off of unpaid labor. But, the future generations of counselors deserve to get through their training with as few burdens as possible. The future of mental health will partly depend on our ability to make the industry fair and accessible to the everyone, not just those with intergenerational wealth.
So, on behalf of counseling interns everywhere who sacrifice their health and wellbeing to keep thousands of mental health organizations alive:
Pay your interns. They deserve every penny.
And for current students: leverage what power you do have. Take cues from labor organizing and see if collective bargaining can help you get fair treatment. Reach out if you’d like to brainstorm on how to get that started.
