Over the course of my three unpaid internships in Washington, D.C., I’ve had great experiences, explored many careers and met some amazing individuals. But each of these great experiences has also required a significant chunk of change from my own pockets.

Many students can’t afford to make the same investment I did. They need a paying summer job to pay off student loans or to simply afford a summer in Washington.

This puts lower-income students at a disadvantage. Many students won’t be able to put positions on the Hill or at any of the city’s many other agencies and companies onto their resume simply because these positions are unpaid.

One argument often touted in favor of unpaid internships is that they give students experienced that many smaller companies and nonprofits wouldn’t be able to support otherwise. All of my unpaid internships came this way, but hiring a temporary employee that you don’t pay is very different from hiring someone in whom you are investing.

While the premise of an unpaid internship is that the intern receives more benefits than the employer, whether that is work experience or a letter of recommendation, this upside is rarely formalized.

Without pay, both the intern and the employer have lower expectations. An employer would almost never fire an unpaid intern, but interns often also lack incentive to put in 100 percent. While this is not a problem entirely caused by the nature of an unpaid internship, a lack of pay absolutely enables mediocre work performance.

Letters of recommendation should speak to the actual performance of an employee at any level, but employers often feel obliged to write positive references for less-than-effective interns. Interns work for free in exchange for a recommendation later, and many have come to expect it, whether or not it is deserved. Even if a recommendation is deserved, is it really worth an entire semester or summer of unpaid labor?

People should reap the rewards of their hard labor, and unpaid internships make it hard to discern both if there is actually a reward and if there was actually labor.

I’m not suggesting that unpaid internships should not exist — far from it. I wouldn’t have many of my current skills without my past internships. However, these significant disadvantages and downsides to the free-labor system must be noted and resolved.

Devin Urness (SFS ’14) is co-president of Relay for Life. He has interned at the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. House of Representatives and Stones’ Phones.