It’s easy to wonder if the recent, and in fact very much ongoing, waves of layoffs in tech and finance could be putting knots in these high-paying industries’ hiring pipelines. But not only does data show the number of job openings is up (here’s a report from earlier this month showing more than 315,000 open tech positions), but these industries are still offering the best-paying internships to students, according to new data from the career site Glassdoor.
Glassdoor took the monthly base pay that companies’ interns reported on the platform, averaged their salaries, then created a list of employers where interns earn the most. (Which of course means a potentially wide range—from Glassdoor’s own numbers, Meta interns report salaries spanning $5,750 a month for a typical summer-long internship, to $18,000 a month for a PhD.-level internship.)
Here are the 25 best-paying companies for interns, according to Glassdoor, along with their average monthly salary:
Glassdoor adds that last year, the average American intern across all industries earned $25 an hour, or about $4,000 per month. That isn’t even half of the pay that interns could earn working for several companies on this list. For students applying to summer internships, high pay is a draw. But this year, they may have other factors to consider.
Sixteen of Glassdoor’s 25 best-paying internships are at tech companies, including the four big social media giants—Meta, TikTok, Snap, and Twitter. Yet since the start of 2022, well over 300,000 tech workers have lost their jobs, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that began tracking job cuts industrywide three years ago. The No. 4 company on Glassdoor’s list, Coinbase, axed 18% of employees in June, then another 20% in January, as Bitcoin tanked, and Coinbase got hacked and sued; became a party to the U.S. Justice Department’s first-ever crypto insider trading case; and paid $50 million in federal fines for not preventing money laundering. Elsewhere in tech, Elon Musk cleaned out around 80% of Twitter’s workforce, Meta’s headcount was reduced by 25%, and Amazon—No. 9 on the list—has cut about 27,000 jobs over the past year. (Meanwhile, it’s the smaller companies that are hiring right now, especially in tech.)
Glassdoor’s list includes internships at five financial institutions, too, stretching from Capital One and Credit Suisse to BlackRock. Capital One just cut 1,100 from its tech staff. BlackRock let 500 go in January, about 3% of the workforce, in its first retrenchment since 2019. Poor beleaguered Credit Suisse, meanwhile, is awaiting a takeover by rival UBS to stave off bankruptcy. Topping things off, a pair of recent studies argue that banking jobs are among the most at-risk from AI.
Finally, the third industry that’s well represented on Glassdoor’s list—consulting—has likewise seen its share of layoffs lately. Bain, McKinsey, and Ernst & Young’s global strategy consulting arm are among the 25 top-paying companies, yet as always during tougher economic times, third-party consultants are oftentimes the first to be let go. Recent months haven’t been kind. In fact, last week Ernst & Young said it’s laying off 3,000 U.S.-based staff from its broader workforce, and McKinsey announced in February what was described as “a rare round of major job cuts,” with news outlets reporting that the firm was hoping attrition or voluntary exits” would result in further reductions.
Months of headlines about layoffs may finally be catching up to these employers. Princeton University noted this week that for the first time in four years, the number of students seeking a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering fell. And even Glassdoor seems to have anticipated this worry: To each company, it also assigns a “Positive Business Outlook” rating that is based on previous Glassdoor reviews. On that 100-point scale, Twitter scored 22%, Snap took home 38%, Coinbase and Credit Suisse received 39%, and Meta was given 47%. “The highest-paying company,” Glassdoor warns, “doesn’t always have the strongest business outlook.”
(6)
