There are many careers with fairly low barrier to entry, recognized career paths, and good almost guaranteed opportunity for employment. All the trades, plus nursing, for instance.
There are many careers where there is more selection process and harder entry but also excellent opportunity for employment and potential high income. Medicine, law, for instance.
Then there are the arts and sports which have a very wide base of beginner and amateur, but only a very small tip of the pyramid making a living wage let alone a good income. But the top of the pyramid can have outsize rewards. This includes music, visual art, performing arts, music, football, hockey, soccer, publishing, writing, dance, etc.
Horses are an art and a sport, and the logistics are similar to other arts and sports. With the qualification that the tip of the pyramid is not nearly as well paid as football or acting or pop music. It’s an underfunded art/sport.
All these arts and sports are things people will do as amateurs or recreationally, and the path to professionalism is not clear. Taking an acting or music degree or playing college football is not enough to guarantee you will win out to the top tier.
Honestly, a lot of very successful writers make very little money (and supplement with teaching/freelancing). Ditto many actors. Even many actors who had a big role struggle afterward. And quite a few successful horse people also have independent wealth BEFORE they got into horses.
All of this is just to add that if someone is encouraging you to work for them for free because of the “opportunities,” or encouraging you to “invest in yourself” and “spend money to make money,” be very leery and look before you leap, and be aware of the incentives they have to encourage you to do so.
This seems like a very nice way to spin it to make it more palatable. The difference of course is that in college, the entire goal of the institution you are paying is to educate you. This is because your professor is making their income being paid to instruct you.
On the other hand, even in the best intentioned working student position, your “professor” is making their income from their paying clients meaning those paying clients are going to be their priority. Not to mention that in college, the work you do is solely to benefit you and further your own education. When you write a paper for a class your professor isn’t benefitting from it. Whereas when a working student does work assigned by the trainer, whether its cleaning tack or riding a horse, it most likely it directly benefits the trainer in some way.
I’m not against working student positions. I’ve had two - I was given free housing and a stipend for both that was enough for me to live off. I got a ton of saddle time and did learn a lot. They translated into my first full time job in the industry, which also paid well and included housing. I think working student positions are an incredibly valuable part of the industry. My issue is when they don’t also come with housing or a stipend to live off of, as that makes it inevitable that only those to whom money isn’t a concern will be able to take advantage of the opportunity.
Sometimes you can’t put a $$ value on experience by doing. You may see them as being " exploited" but they may have no problem with what they are paid. It may be all about the experience they can get.
They choose to take the job knowing what the pay is.
LOL tell me you’ve never gone to nursing school without telling me you’ve never gone to nursing school. It’s not a fairly low barrier to entry, it’s competitive to get accepted to nursing school, with a fairly difficult pre-admission test that requires a qualifying score for admission, and at the end there’s a comprehensive licensing exam. Less than 80% of graduate nurses passed their National Board Exam in 2022 on the first try; this is after grinding out a difficult two to three year program.
Like with any other job when that happens they are free to find something else. So many people claim that boarding/ training/ lesson barns make no money so how can they expect them to pay their workers anything??
Because if they are a working student who bought their horse with them, rearranged their life and finances to work for a stipend in exchange for an education, it’s extremely difficult to drop everything and run and turn on a time when the pro is not giving them what they promised (i.e., making them do work they said they wouldn’t have to do, not giving them riding time, or not giving them time to eat/sleep a reasonable amount)?
Also, if someone is a “stayer” and “doesn’t quit” they might stay in an untenable position that’s not serving them against their better interests, yet not be rewarded for their loyalty. Or they might not want to leave early and make an enemy of someone powerful in the industry.
There was a recent interview, can’t remember where I saw it (instagram maybe?) with a young (16 ish) WS for a BNR. She started at 13 cleaning stalls and tack, then flatting the oldies, then showing the steddy eddies, etc… Now at 16 she is jumping 2* GP on his sale horses and starting all the 3-year-olds. She was saying they never could decide who the arrangement benefitted more
There is a big difference in being a student and working for a for-profit business. It’s typically not compliant with labor laws to have “interns” or “working students” at your for-profit horse training stable that aren’t getting paid at least minimum wage. Offering board or lessons or other forms of barter compensation actually tends to work against the barn because that creates an employer-employee relationship. Using these people as a substitute for usual paid labor (grooms, muckers, assistant trainers) is also not a good factor for the barn.
And don’t even get me started on all the ads I see specifying they are looking for a certain gender to fill the role or that the person must be single, or any of that discriminatory nonsense.
You can be an unpaid student working for a for-profit business. Unpaid internships are legal and common in many industries. There are some guidelines they’re supposed to meet but no hard and fast rules (at least by US federal standards). Generally speaking as long as both parties are clear that the job isn’t paid and the student gets something out of it in return there’s no requirement for a student to be paid. There are definitely working students who don’t meet these standards by any interpretation and are being taken advantage of, but that doesn’t mean the whole concept is bad.
I’m not in the horse industry but I did a few unpaid internships in college. I got great experience, references, and some real stuff to put on my resume before I graduated. I supported myself on part-time jobs and student loans, and was able to get a good job after graduation that I don’t think I would have gotten without internship experience. In an ideal world everyone would get paid AND get an education, but it’s just not the reality in all industries.
I expect the glamor of print publication is pretty much gone these days. But in the 1990s and oughts, the unpaid magazine or publishing internship for recent college grads was a thing. It was highly competitive and it was a strong route in. But it also required that a young person have the resources to live in New York City for a summer or a year without a salary, while participating in the workplace lifestyle. Which basically tilted selection towards trust fund babies and those with wealthy, culturally savvy parents.
And yes, college programs that really want their students to succeed will build good internship modules into their degrees as well.
The larger problem is that the horse industry is difficult financially and physically, and there is no corporate path to success.
That makes it much more tenuous than doing an accountant internship or teaching practicum or interning as a New Yorker fact checker en route to becoming a staff writer.
You are correct, but I think a lot of the actual working student positions do not meet the requirements. I did have some internships and working student positions while I was in school, and it can be done, but I see so many ads for positions that just make me cringe because they definitely don’t follow the guidelines.
Everyone should be paid a decent wage, with deductions. In 40 years, you’ll have no social security income from the years of working for free.
From that income, you pay for your lessons.
Being an employee hopefully gives you workman’s comp and possibly more.
A trainer should house you and treat you like an employee, with days off too.
I guess the person who accepts that type of job is probably fairly familiar with what " might" happen once they start working. It seems to be pretty well known that “working students” is a fair description of what your life will be like.
Seems to me that these students should do their research on a particular trainer before accepting the position and hopefully that will make it successful and a good experience for both parties.
