Where Did America’s Summer Jobs Go?

Once a rite of passage, fewer teenagers are spending their breaks earning a paycheck.

It’s not like the jobs aren’t there. The ice cream still needs scooping. A Tilt-a-Whirl doesn’t run itself. And that floppy, weirdly heavy rubber frog that somersaults toward the rotating lily pads? Hit or miss, someone’s got to bring it back to the catapult for the next lucky player. The work of an American summer remains, sticky and sweet as cotton candy, which doesn’t sell itself either.

But when Jenkinson’s Boardwalk went looking for seasonal employees last year, the response was not at all what the company expected. To fill some 1,200 summer vacancies, an Easter-time job fair drew just 400 people. Applications did bounce up this year, but not nearly enough to reverse a grave trend that summer employers have noticed well beyond the Jersey Shore.

“It is getting harder to find students that will work,” says Toby Wolf, director of marketing at the boardwalk. “Each year it’s getting harder and harder. None of us has been able to pinpoint why. Is it a change in society as a whole?”

This is a question to chew over on the long road trip from Glacier National Park–where concessions could be staffed by Bulgarians on work-study visas–to Maine, which each summer struggles to fill the lifeguard chairs above its beaches. The same story holds at the water attractions at Wisconsin Dells and on Cedar Point’s roller coasters in Sandusky, Ohio. As a nation, we have lately endured the demise of comity and the fracture of factual truth. Are we now witnessing the slow death of the summer job?

The numbers are not encouraging. Forty years ago, nearly 60% of U.S. teenagers were working or looking for work during the peak summer months. Last year, just 35% were. Note the element of declaration: what the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tabulates are reports of actually desiring work during the months when most high schools and colleges are off. It is a statement of intent. Plotted on a chart, the decline is unmistakable and, since the turn of the new century, precipitous–plummeting 15 points in 15 years, to where we are now: only about every third youth working or looking for work this summer.

All this as the nation’s job outlook is what economists describe as “full employment” and as employers display a hale appetite for summer help.

The payroll offers at least partial confirmation: more and more, jobs historically done by vacationing students are being taken by older Americans forced to extend their working lives, or foreigners looking for their chance. At the same time, for many young Americans in the second decade of the 21st century, the choice is not between a summer job and a summer idyll.

The preoccupations of the heavily scheduled school year–college preparation, organized sports, volunteer work–are also determining what one does on summer vacation.

But not for all.

What’s changing in America? Not observations on kids these days. Polls confirm what the heart already knows: every generation thinks the one coming up behind it is at least a little bit spoiled. The sentiment is expressed first as aspiration–the desire to see your kids live better than you were able to–and then, if prosperity indeed arrives, as complaint. “Kids don’t work anymore,” says the manager of a company that struggles to recruit teen counselors for sleepaway camps, speaking privately to vent. “Mine are 12 and 14, and they want everything to be done for them.”

But what has most assuredly changed is how much more some of us are prospering compared with others.

This sorting of the U.S. population at least begins to account for the change in how teens are spending their summers. The BLS reports that, in a societal shift as slow (and as relentless) as the movement of tectonic plates, less affluent older workers are indeed delaying retirement and taking part-time jobs in fields, like food preparation, where teens are now working less. But the same market forces that require some to keep thinking about work later in life compels their grandchildren to begin thinking about it earlier and earlier.

The calculus begins with a question: What makes the biggest difference in a lifetime’s income? The answer has been shown to be higher education. A bachelor’s degree or higher pays a premium of more than 85%. Kids have been told this forever, and for the last couple of generations–the members of X and Y–preparation for success began in kindergarten. And those plans do not encourage passing July afternoons painting houses.

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