Assets Beget Assets: Teen Workers and Summer Jobs

When you were a teenager, did you work summer jobs? According to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, about 57% of 16-19 year olds had summer jobs in 1989. Fast forward to 2010 and just 29.6% of these older teens are employed in the summer months.

A Boston Globe story from this morning highlights the challenges teens face this summer in finding employment and points out the role that social networks, socioeconomic background, and families play in paving the way to employment for some kids. The piece profiles a handful of Boston-area teens whose parents have hired them to work in family businesses because opportunities were so limited elsewhere. The Globe story explains:

“There’s definitely a very high correlation between employment rates of teens and household income,” says Snyder [of Commonwealth Corp., a quasi-state agency that develops summer jobs for youth in Massachusetts.] In families with incomes of less than $20,000, only about 24 percent of teens work summer jobs, whereas in families with incomes between $100,000 and $149,000, 45 percent of teens have jobs, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. “The job market is personal. It’s relationship-driven.”

The article demonstrates just one among the countless ways in which assets beget assets. Youth from higher-income backgrounds benefit enormously from the financial resources, social connections, and job markets to which their parents have access. Opportunities compound over time and privileged young people who participate in the job market benefit in the form of higher-paying jobs, more developed social networks to rely on for information about future jobs, resumes that are more attractive to college admissions officers, and so forth. Meanwhile, lower-income teens are left scrambling to find jobs, frequently without any of the same benefits of community connections, parental ownership of businesses, or school-based support.

Disappointingly, although perhaps not suprisingly, the article does not feature any of these lower-income teens who have been shut out of summer employment. By not fully connecting the dots on how socioeconomic status so closely predicts summer employment, the Globe piece does not challenge prevailing understandings of lower-income teens’ work ethic. This does a disservice to these young people. There are plenty of unpleasant stereotypes out there about the supposed laziness of lower-income youth (cough Newt Gingrich cough). As 17-year old DC resident Khalid Bullock told the Washington Post last year, “We have the desire, we just don’t have the opportunity.”

Instead of hand-wringing about upper middle class teens in high-income Boston suburbs who are reluctantly taking jobs at dad’s gourmet wine and cheese shop (I am not making this up), let’s focus on the millions of youth who have little to no opportunity to gain meaningful job experience and earn some money during their summer vacations. While we can blame the recent recession for contributing to low levels of teen summer employment, the truth is low-income teens were struggling long before the economic downturn.

The stakes are very high: as our Fellows Willie Elliott and Terri Friedline have both written about extensively, youth with savings in their name are dramatically more likely to attend college. A summer job is a critical path to savings, particularly for youth whose parents are lower-income and therefore unable to contribute to their kids’ accounts. Supporting lower-income teens in finding meaningful summer jobs is just one way to equalize opportunity for future academic and employment success. It would be exciting to see mainstream media outlets covering the dearth of employment opportunities for low-income teens and highlighting efforts at the local, state, and even federal level to boost opportunity for these young people.