End of an era for unpaid internships as companies start canceling their jobs programs

Millions of students and recent graduates have depended on internships as a way of testing a career path and getting a foot in the door of a desirable company. Especially in the United States and Europe, the internship has become almost a rite of passage. But a nagging debate on both the legality and ethicalness of unpaid internships has been raging for years, culminating in a slew of lawsuits against big companies that has resulted in many of them closing their internship programs. Condé Nast, for example, the publisher of magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ, is shuttering their popular internship program next year. It's likely that other companies will follow, if only to avoid bad press and lawsuits. The change will have a big impact on both companies and young employees. For businesses, they will need to hire more low-level grunts to do sub-entry-level work. For new graduates, they will have to look for other opportunities to get noticed by employers. Both ways, culture is changing, the internship trend has hit a wall and is set to reverse in the foreseeable future.