The Answer is Federal Funding

What is the question? “As Spring 2010 college graduates prepare to search for jobs, many from low-income families will start at a competitive disadvantage because they have had to work rather than take crucial, but often unpaid, professional internships that provide key skills for entering the workforce,” the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) claims. “A new legislative proposal from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and Demos seeks to remedy this inequity by providing funding for low-income students to take high-quality public service internships.”

Of course they do. This is the same outfit that ran a commercial back in the 1990s allegedly showing that the U. S. spends less of its Gross Domestic Product on education than any other nation.

Unfortunately, they were only counting federal spending in America, not state and local, and, as one EPI analyst told me when I pointed out declining scores that went with spending hikes, they “didn’t want to get into that whole quantity versus quality thing.”

Now, they’re baaaaack. “The proposal calls for providing qualified students with a uniform grant of $3,500 for three month full-time internships and $7,000 for six month full-time internships” they claim.

You know what, at the American Journalism Center we’ve been doing that for about five years, without the federales, or for that matter, EPI.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.