August 10, 2015
Teens have plenty of options on how to keep busy in the summer: camps, internships, vacations, volunteer opportunities.
The one option that isn’t so popular? Having a job.
"The teen summer job has been going the way of telephone booths and the cassette tape for decades," Peter Gosselin writes in Bloomberg News, and the latest data only confirm that trend.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s latest job report shows that the July labor force participation rate for 16-to-19-year-olds was 41.3 percent, a record low in the post-World War II period.
It’s hardly a surprise: According to a 2009 Federal Reserve study, the employment rate for 16- and 17-year-olds got cut in half between the 1980s and today.
A Pew study found that less than a third of teens had a job in June, July and August last year, compared to the 58 percent of teens who were employed in the summer of ’78.
Broken down by race and ethnicity, the summer employment rate in 2014 for 16-to-19-year-olds was 34 percent for white teens, 19.3 percent for African-Americans, 23 percent for Asians and 25 percent for Hispanics of any race. The most common jobs were in restaurants, hotels and retail.
The Fed study identified immigrants as one of the main reasons for the drop in teen employment. It estimated that a 10 percent increase in the number of non-college-educated immigrants reduces the average hours that native teens work by 3 to 3.5 percent.
In contrast, the effect for non-college-educated adults is less than 1 percent.
Other factors that lower the teen employment rate: There are fewer low-skill jobs in the U.S., more teens are doing unpaid internships or taking summer college classes, and fewer teens want a job in the first place.
In 2012, when the Census Bureau asked teens who weren't working if they wanted a job, only 9.5 percent said yes.
Teens nowadays evidently feel that there are better ways to spend their summers than waiting tables and flipping burgers.
