Unit 3: Compelling Evidence: "Teenagers Have Stopped Getting Summer Jobs—Why?" by Derek Thompson

Now the vast majority don’t.

Are they being lazy, or strategic?

The summer job is considered a rite of passage for the American Teenager.

One can rule out that hypothesis pretty quickly.

The number of teens in the workforce has collapsed since 2000, as the graph below shows.

In fact, it has not budged more than 0.1 percentage point since the late 1990s.

The supposed laziness of American teenagers is unchanging and, literally, average.

Education is to blame, rather than indolence.

The second reason why teens work less today is that employers are more reluctant to hire them.

Second, older Americans stay in the workforce longer than ever, and many of them wind down their careers in office secretary and retail jobs, which used to be the province of 16-year-olds in the summer.

Together, these policies have reduced the number of temporary paid jobs for teenagers in the public and private sector.

Fourth, companies have caught on to the fact that if they want to hire teenagers, they don’t have to pay them, at all: There has been an extraordinary rise in unpaid internships over the last decade.

The last big-picture explanation for the demise of teen summer jobs is cultural.

Teenagers are exquisitely sensitive to the social norms of their peers.

That suggests—although it cannot prove—that summer jobs have lost cultural cachet, as the norm has shifted away from working.

That suggests—although it cannot prove—that summer jobs have lost cultural cachet, as the norm has shifted away from working.

It’s important to note that it’s probably white adults who feel the strongest nostalgia for summer jobs.

First, the summer-job bump has declined for all ethnicities in the last 40 years.

Altogether, summer jobs may be yet another vector through which privilege becomes inherited from one generation to the next.

Don’t they teach kids responsibility, “soft skills,” and a humbling tolerance for the tedium of office life?

(It will be interesting to see if the summer job has a resurgence in the new low-unemployment economy.)

The mysterious disappearance of the summer job for teenagers turns out to be a perfect parable for the flexibility of the workforce.

But rather than use the fallow months to quintuple their video-game time, teenagers are taking the time to invest in their educational future.

This is hardly the place to expend America’s finite national anxiety.

This is hardly the place to expend America’s finite national anxiety.