It seems strange to me that in a recession, companies would want less interns (unpaid or paid), not more. Yes, using interns effectively - especially in a larg

It seems strange to me that in a recession, companies would want less interns (unpaid or paid), not more. Yes, using interns effectively - especially in a large organisation - requires considerable management resources. As well, their limited tenure (a summer, say) gives them very limited value as a useful, specialised IT employee's ramp-up period to break even can be longer than that. Still, there are lots of smaller companies that use interns to build entire products over summers; I think the one that's most well-known here is probably Joel Spolsky's Fog Creek Software. And I've run into several web-oriented companies that do the same here in Atlanta. I would think they'd be foaming at the mouth for a chance to get unpaid, or very low-paid slave labour with a rather high skills to cost ratio. Now, of course, I have little reference frame for the usefulness of interns outside of the IT profession. But, surely there has to be a correlate to this opportunity in other directions of commercial endeavour as well?