I can't speak for the others your been talking with, but I can assure you that this isn't something that an intern can just fix. I'm not a developer, I'm work on the infrastructure side as a manager, but I can tell you what the developers at my company went through.
We're not talking about some simple little blog that needs to be fixed, we're talking about large scale corporate applications. I can vouch for these large cost upgrades. The last place I was at was using IE as a front end to a giant AS/400 manufacturing database. Now we're not just talking one little web site that connects to the AS/400, we're talking about hundreds of web based applications, each one controlling a portion of factory operations, each one with it's own little quirks. It took 10 developers 18 months to convert everything. Our developers make an average of 80k per year, so that puts this cheap little "intern" capable upgrade at a cost of 1.2 million.
Then there's the vendor applications. Our phone systems was running Cisco Call Manger 4.x. After the install CM is completely controlled and configured through a web interface and CM 4.x only works with IE6. So we had to upgrade CM to work with IE7/8 and that took about 40k in labor and expenses.
So please I'd love to meet this Intern you mention, I'd certainly like to awe in amazement at his super coding skills that can do the work of 10 developers and condense it down into a summer.
