There is a broad trend, from real estate to finance to education, in overvaluing the future at the expense of the present. Even though you couldn’t possibly pay for your house on your current wages, the banks financed that property assuming that it would one day be worth more. Pensions offer defined benefits based on the assumption that the future looks much brighter than the present – often assuming sunny-yet-risky 8% returns even in the face of global recession. And nowhere is this more evident than education – with U.S. wages stagnant at around 1.3% growth per annum, university tuition has been growing in the double-digits for years. This means that we once again assume that the future will be a priori more prosperous than the present, otherwise educational institutions would simply have to admit to offering less education, less opportunity per dollar.

Along with our overvalued formal education market, the United States has also been overvaluing early job opportunities. According to the New York Times, more and more U.S. companies have been turning to unpaid internships for actual labor, enough to cause some state attorneys general to pursue them for violating minimum wage laws.

Internships, in principle, are opportunities for students to be exposed to professional situations, while forgoing both compensation and any real work responsibilities. The benefit is supposed to be in the direction of the student, primarily, largely an altruistic gesture on behalf of companies. In practice, though, many companies are taking advantage of the weak job market to get free labor in exchange for padding a candidate’s CV. These companies are failing to provide the educational side of the bargain, and often putting the young people to work in cold-calling, clerical work, and other jobs that are normally compensated in full.

“We’ve had cases where unpaid interns really were displacing workers and where they weren’t being supervised in an educational capacity,” said Bob Estabrook, spokesman for Oregon’s labor department. His department recently handled complaints involving two individuals at a solar panel company who received $3,350 in back pay after claiming that they were wrongly treated as unpaid interns.

Many students said they had held internships that involved noneducational menial work. To be sure, many internships involve some unskilled work, but when the jobs are mostly drudgery, regulators say, it is clearly illegal not to pay interns.

Washington DC especially works like this, but often the exchange is an entree into a highly specialized world – foreign policy, humanitarian work, affinity associations (“Federal Bass Players Association”) – that don’t just hire anywhere. The system is still often abused.

Companies may find this an easy way to get labor for the present, but since these workers are often overburdened with debt, the risk is in talent simply walking away to other endeavors, perhaps even other countries.

There’s a talent crunch coming, in case you haven’t heard.