Paid summer internships plunge as major US banks, companies trim costs

Wall Street banks and other major companies have cut back on paid summer internships as businesses look to slash costs — intensifying the competition for the few plum jobs available, according to a report.

Goldman Sachs hired 200 fewer summer analysts this year than in 2023, while JPMorgan cut its summer analyst class by 600, more than 10%, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s Tesla slashed a major chunk of the usual 6,000 summer intern class , rescinding offers just weeks before the college students were due to begin work.

The drastic change comes after hedge funds like Citadel paid a select crop of interns nearly $20,000 a month to participate in an 11-week “math boot camp” in 2023, as The Post previously reported.

However, expenses to woo interns with entertainment events billed as team-building exercises, housing costs and on-campus recruiting all drag down the bottom line.

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Cost-conscious firms have also cut back on white-collar positions after hiring too many graduates following the pandemic, leaving little room for interns to take over, industry experts said.

“If I was a CEO and I was looking at things to cut, this would definitely be one of the first,” Matthew Hora, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies internships, told the Financial Times.

ZipRecruiter said postings for white-collar internships fell 14% since last summer, while Indeed said listings were down 17% .

“I think that’s broadly a reflection of the sectors that tend to hire for interns [having] seen a pronounced pullback in job postings, especially for those traditional, white-collar corporate positions,” Nick Bunker, an economic research director at Indeed, told FT.

Overall, ads for roles in finance and consulting fell the most, Bunker added.

With fewer jobs comes more competition. Goldman Sachs received 315,000 applications for just 3,000 jobs, according to the Financial Times – a more competitive acceptance rate than Harvard University.

Internships offer experience, skills and can open doors

And JPMorgan received 493,000 applications – up 82% since last summer, according to the Financial Times.

“The application process for internships has become just as competitive as for full-time roles,” Lesley Mitler, a career coach who specializes in college students, told FT.

Bunker, however, said there is “no need to sound a red alarm.”

He called the decline in job postings this year a “moderation,” since internship listings boomed in 2022 and 2023 – the first summers back in full-swing after the pandemic. Although down from last year, summer job postings are still up 26% since 2019, according to Indeed research.

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A JPMorgan spokesperson told The Post that the company had 4,400 summer interns this year, “which is consistent with the number of interns from 2022 and normalizing from last year where we had significant business growth and expansion.”

“Overall, our number of summer interns has grown significantly over the last four years, up from 3,100 in 2021,” the rep added.

A Bank of America employee told The Post they haven’t noticed any change in the company’s summer internship class – and that the CEO recently boasted about thousands of new intern and full-time hires.

Recent college grads who have had a job or internship relevant to their degree are more than twice as likely to secure a “good” job after graduation, according to Gallup data from 2017 .

But there are many challenges to securing an internship.

Among students who did not complete an internship during their time in college, the top reason cited was difficulty in obtaining an internship, according to Gallup data.

Internships are notoriously more difficult for first-generation students and low-income students who cannot afford to work without pay.

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