Anonymous wrote:Unpaid internships should be illegal.

This.

OP, I'm generally sympathetic to such arrangements. An unpaid internship a gazillion years ago (I held a job on the side and was fortunate to be in a then low COL area) got me through doors I could have probably not knocked open on my own (especially with ZERO family connections).

Yet my understanding is that employment in the sports field is pretty brutal and the jobs now skew much more towards kids with quant backgrounds, not sports management degrees. While your DH's views don't seem to align with your son's interests, your son's interests may not be so realistic. I'd probably support him with a strict understanding, perhaps even written, about the summer budget and that covering excessive spending will be on him.

Anonymous wrote:You have two problems, OP: The value in this internship and dad trying to mold DS into his fantasy private equity golden child. They will have to be dealt with separately.

If this is a PE firm then they should be paying like the ibanks and consulting firms do for summer internships.
But those are well run programs and not sucking down senior people’s time training and explaining krap to zero experience 20 yos.

No one wants an intern taking more than 10% of their time. Clients would be livid and so would P&L.

Sports, media and entertainment underpay all the time. At every title.
Hopefully he looked that up by now. Good luck.

I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, you can think of it the way you do the expensive specialized programs kids do in HS summers or financing your child’s travel. It’s a learning experience and you want to give your child support following their interests or dreams. However, it does come at a significant cost to you. If you can afford to spend the money without any sacrifices (and you are ok if it leads nowhere), go for it. For me I’d have to say no. We are drained just by the educational expenses. So my kids would have to have saved enough money the previous summer or working during the school year and be willing to live frugally. I think that willingness would also tell me how badly they wanted it and then I might give them a few hundred a month to help.

Our youngest considered sports management but it’s so fiercely competitive that he changed his mind. We had a neighbor whose daughter studied it and then got a minimum wage job with a very popular pro sports team. She did something with outreach. Unfortunately it didn’t lead to a career and the COL in the city was killer so ultimately the experience didn’t pay off.

What is the actual job? Unpaid "internships" are legal if they are just watching other people work or being trained in a skill and 1:1 supervised while they work.