A school partnership is reconsidering whether student internships may be unpaid. Perspective 1: All student labor should be paid to ensure fairness. Perspective 2: Unpaid internships remain valuable learning opportunities that some organizations could not otherwise offer. Perspective 3: Flexible stipends can protect access without eliminating small-host placements. Write an essay that evaluates these perspectives and develops your own position.
What the evaluator is looking for
ACT readers reward a clear perspective, analysis of relationships among perspectives, relevant development, logical organization, precise language, and control of standard written English.
Planning approach
Frame unpaid placements as an access barrier, acknowledge small-host constraints, and require wages or pooled need-based stipends.
Model response
Internships promoted through public schools should include wages or an equivalent need-based stipend. Learning has value, but that value does not pay bus fare or replace earnings a student gives up to participate. Compensation makes career exploration available to more than those whose families can subsidize it.
The strongest defense of unpaid placements is that a small nonprofit, studio, or neighborhood business may offer excellent mentoring without having payroll capacity. Eliminating those hosts would narrow the range of experiences. Yet leaving compensation entirely optional creates a predictable divide: affluent students collect professional contacts while classmates with paid evening jobs cannot accept the same opportunity. Calling both groups equally free to participate ignores their circumstances.
Schools can preserve small placements through shared funding. Larger employers should pay an hourly wage, while districts, foundations, and workforce agencies could pool stipends for qualifying community hosts. Every placement should specify supervision, learning goals, hours, and meaningful tasks so payment does not legitimize busywork. Program reports should compare participation by income and track host retention. A fair internship system recognizes two facts at once: mentorship is educational, and a student's time has material cost.
Structural breakdown
The argument makes opportunity cost concrete, grants the best nonprofit objection, and answers it with differentiated funding. Quality standards keep compensation from becoming the only measure.
- Explain how unpaid work affects access.
- Preserve placements at resource-limited hosts.
- Assign payment responsibility by employer capacity.
- Require genuine learning goals and supervision.
Format reference: ACT: Description of the Writing Test. This model is original and is not an official or accepted submission.