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Seattle Times
Why aren’t American
teens working anymore?
By Ben Steverman, Bloomberg News
June 15, 2017
This summer American teenagers should find it a little easier to get a
job — if they want one.
The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 4.3 percent in May, the lowest in 16
years, so teens started looking for summer jobs in the best labor
market since the tech boom of the early 2000s. The May unemployment
rate for 16- to 19-year-olds was 14.3 percent, but teens usually find
it harder to find jobs than their more experienced elders. Back in
2009, the teenage jobless rate hit 27 percent.
A CareerBuilder survey of 2,587 employers released last month found
that 41 percent were planning to hire seasonal workers for the summer,
up from 29 percent last year.
But the unemployment rate measures joblessness only among people who
are actively looking for work. And many American teens aren’t.
In July of last year, 43 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds were either
working or looking for a job. That’s 10 points lower than in July 2006.
In 1988 and 1989, the July labor force participation rate for teenagers
nearly hit 70 percent.
Whether you’re looking at summer jobs or at teen employment year-round,
the work trends for teenagers show a clear pattern over the last three
decades. When recessions hit, in the early 1990s, early 2000s, and from
2007 to 2009, teen labor participation rates plunge. As the economy
recovers, though, teen labor doesn’t bounce back. The BLS expects the
teen labor force participation rate to drop below 27 percent in 2024,
or 30 points lower than the peak seasonally adjusted rate in 1989.
Why aren’t teens working? Lots of theories have been offered: They’re
being crowded out of the workforce by older Americans, now working past
65 at the highest rates in more than 50 years.
Immigrants are competing with teens for jobs; a 2012 study found that
less educated immigrants affected employment for U.S. native-born
teenagers far more than for native-born adults.
Parents are pushing kids to volunteer and sign up for extracurricular
activities instead of working, to impress college admission counselors.
College-bound teens aren’t looking for work because the money doesn’t
go as far as it used to. “Teen earnings are low and pay little toward
the costs of college,” the BLS noted this year. The federal minimum
wage is $7.25 an hour. Elite private universities charge tuition of
more than $50,000.
Or maybe, as cranky old people have asserted for generations, teenagers
are just getting lazy.
A recent BLS analysis offers another theory, backed up by solid data.
It appears that millions of teenagers aren’t working because they’re
studying instead.
Over the last few decades, education has taken up more and more of
teenagers’ time, as school districts lengthen both the school day and
the academic year. During the school year, academic loads have gotten
heavier. Education is also eating up teenagers’ summers. Teens aren’t
going to summer school just because they failed a class and need to
catch up. They’re also enrolling in enrichment courses and taking
courses for college credit.
In July of last year, more than two in five 16- to 19-year-olds were
enrolled in school. That’s four times times as many as were enrolled in
1985, BLS data show.
Students have more to learn in their four years of high school. In
1982, fewer than one in 10 high school graduates had completed at least
four years of English classes, three years of math, science, and social
science, and two years of a foreign language. By 2009, the most recent
data in the U.S. Digest of Education Statistics, the share of grads
taking those classes was almost 62 percent.
High school students aren’t just taking more classes. They’re taking
tougher ones. What’s happened in math reflects trends in other areas.
Calculus is up threefold since the early 1980s, while precalculus is up
more than fivefold, and statistics and probability courses are up
tenfold. Almost a million students graduated in 2009 having taken an
advanced placement (AP) class, up 39 percent from four years earlier.
All this studying has obvious benefits, but a single-minded focus on
education has disadvantages, too. A summer job can help teenagers grow
up as it expands their experience beyond school and home. Working teens
learn how to manage money, deal with bosses and get along with
co-workers of all ages.
A summer job can even save lives. In a study released last month by the
National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers analyzed the effects
of two Chicago programs providing students with part-time jobs along
with mentors for the summer. The programs had little apparent effect on
the teens’ later employment or education—a big concern in itself—but
arrests for violent crime plunged, by 42 percent for one program and 33
percent for the other, an effect felt for at least a year after the
programs ended. If teens got nothing else out of the jobs programs, the
researchers suggested, they were at least “learning to better avoid or
manage conflict.”
Read this and other articles at The Seattle Times
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