New York University has developed some new plans to protect its students from questionable internships.

May I suggest it start by looking into those offered by DHS?

After pressure from students, New York University’s career center has implemented a number of measures to improve screening of the internship listings it features online.

The NYU Wasserman Center for Career Development now requires employers indicate that unpaid internships meet Labor Department guidelines before posting them on CareerNet, the school’s online jobs site. The Wasserman Center’s website also offers students a link to the Labor Department’s website ­­­and a guide to help students identify potentially fraudulent job postings. Additionally, the site provides a comprehensive directory of internship coordinators across NYU departments.

The career center declined to comment on the changes.

NYU junior Christina Isnardi began pressuring the career center last year with a petition demanding that the center “remove postings of illegal, exploitative unpaid internships.” The political science and film production double major says she was inspired to start the campaign after working a string of exploitative internships – and watching her friends get shut out of unpaid opportunities they couldn’t afford. The career center didn’t help: Isnardi says after responding to a posting on CareerNet, she ended up at an unpaid internship where she had to do the work of a full-time employee, for free.

“I wasn’t getting paid, and it was pretty illegitimate,” Isnardi said. “I talked to [the career center] afterwards, and I said, ‘This shouldn’t be there.'”

Labor Department guidelines say for-profit companies can’t derive immediate advantage from unpaid work or use unpaid interns to displace paid workers. Interns have to understand they’re not entitled to wages or future jobs. Internships have to be similar to educational environments and for the benefit of the interns.

But the guidelines also say if interns receive academic credit and schools conduct oversight, internships are more likely to be considered legal. As a result, many colleges act as internship brokers — with varying levels of oversight. A 2012 survey found 90 percent of colleges offered academic credit for off-campus internships. But only half of the officials surveyed said their schools had “actively put measures in place to monitor the quality of unpaid internships.”

On a campus of around 19,000 undergraduates, about 1,150 people have signed Isnardi’s petition asking NYU’s career center to remove illegal postings, including students, professors and other supporters. Isnardi thinks more people supported her cause but were afraid to add their names.

“I’ve had friends who said they completely supported me, but they thought that just by supporting this petition, they’d be blacklisted by employers,” Isnardi said. “There’s definitely a lot of fear.”