Why an unpaid internship is not exploitative
Internships are for people who need more experience before they have a value to offer a company. If you want to increase your monetary value, increase your experiential value. In your early career, experience is currency. And it’s experience that will eventually get you more monetary currency.
During an internship those months of learning and training may not be financially compensated immediately but you can think of the financial compensation as delayed gratification. It’ll come when you land your first job after college. That job is offered to you based on your experience—again that internship experience promises monetary compensation later.
Remember, what you get during your internship experience is much more valuable than whatever cash you could have gotten elsewhere at that time. You could have found a low paying job (or maybe you are concurrently working a minimum wage job as so many interns do), but the internship learning is the piece that is so valuable because it’s going to eventually get you out of minimum wage rates.
You are not being exploited, just because you are doing work and not getting paid. This is a shortsighted way of seeing the problem. If you could get a job getting paid for that work, you would have. But since your resume is short on real experience and proven results, you’ll need to milk your internship for all that it’s worth to prove you’re someone with a value, someone worth paying.