Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Summer Doldrums

The end of the school year is coming up rapidly, and for those of us with kids in high school, many of them will be out looking for a summer job. But there will be fewer of them than in years past. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 40 percent of all people aged 16 to 19 had a summer job last year.

That's a huge change from summers past. A generation ago, in 1978, roughly 72 percent of all teens held down a summer job. As recently as the late 1990s, the percentage was about 60 percent.

It's a combination of a couple of things. With a still-sluggish economy, the teen unemployment rate remains above 20 percent. But many more of them simply aren't interested in working. Of the more than 11 million teens who didn't work last summer, only 8.3 percent said they wished they had a job.

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