People think an ivy league degree is a first class ticket to a high salary, but sometimes it won't even get you off the ground.
From NY Times
The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not
One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots.
It gets sadder
...an N.Y.U. student who hoped to work in animation during her unpaid internship said she was instead assigned to the facilities department and ordered to wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu.
Employers don't care about your English Literature major - whether it's from Harvard or Heald - if you can't offer a scarce, valuable skill-set then you're deadweight with high overhead. Employers can't afford training expenses in order to explore your self-proclaimed genius level aptitude. So when college kids come knocking on their doors begging for free work, employers are forced to assign them low-training, low-skilled tasks... like cleaning doorknobs.
