Two years ago my company with local university prepared an internship program for a group of students. At the end one student was hired, but since it was government program, he also got government salary (aka the lowest possible). Today he literally BLEW UP when he found out that new recruits he was tutoring for last 3 months will earn twice as him currently.

Two years later he's still working for them on an intern salary? Whose fault is that?

That aside:

As an intern (outside the unicorn amazing interns) I think salary is kind irrelevant, because no matter how much interns like to kid themselves, they're of little to no value.

@N00bPancakes It depends. The majority yes, but a minority can skill up very quickly and be immensely valuable, especially given how little they're paid. Those ones tend to move on quickly however.

@AlmondSauce

Yeah I used to work with interns in another career.

Mostly they were just a cost as far as my time goes. I could have done my job and their job easily... and more without them.

Having said that the company chose to take interns and they were largely good kids and I didn't mind or anything.

We did have 2 (out of a ton) that proved to be very capable. We hired them, they were great. I'm not sure they were productive as interns, but but clearly they were going to be after a bit.

Intern unicorns ;)

I'm kind of in charge of managing interns and juniors and most of my rants are about their incompetence.

... however, I do see an endless loop where you must have experience to get a job, but the only way to get experience is through a job, so... nobody ever gets experience. And the biggest problem with interns is that they're not paid, so most of them are unmotivated, which makes it all the much harder. The managers have even jokingly called internships "a kind of modern slavery".

I think this problem could be solved if universities would spend less time on the theoretical and more on the practical, so they would come out actually being useful.

Company has weird rules.
To be promoted you have to work X time and with promotion you can get not more then 15% increase of salary. If your starting salary is high then 15% is quite nice sum, but in his case even 15% salary was just pennies. Company doesn't care and from my point they exploited him to the max.