While the advice may seem like a no-brainer to boomer or Gen X parents who scooped ice cream or worked retail in high school as a rite of passage, it bears repeating for teens today, who are less likely to get summer jobs than they were a generation or two ago—due to a mix of jobs being automated or outsourced, plus a rise in college-focused summer classes. In the summer of 1978, for example, nearly 60% of teens were working or looking for work; that percentage has generally been on the decline ever since, seeing a steep drop-off after 2000, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2017, just 35% of teens were working or looking for work.
But since the pandemic, those numbers have been slowly climbing: In 2021, 36.6% of teens had a job for at least part of the summer, according to a Pew Research analysis—and as of the May 2024 jobs report, 38% of kids 16 to 19 had a job or were looking for one.
“Much to my delight, the labor market for teens has grown stronger and stronger,” Alicia Sasser Modestino, research director at the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University, tells Fortune. “It’s all about supply and demand, because we came out of COVID and we were grappling with the ‘take this job and shove it’ economy… Employers rediscovered teenagers as a source of labor because they were desperate.”
And that’s a very good thing, according to experts. Here’s why.
Teen self-esteem
“I really love teen summer jobs for a number of reasons,” Connecticut-based teen and adolescent psychologist Barbara Greenberg tells Fortune. Including, she says: “It’s wonderful for self-esteem.”
The reason it’s such an ego boost, she explains, is “one, you are necessary, because they need you. You wake up and know you’re needed at a place. Plus, you get reimbursed for your work.”
Because of these factors, she sometimes finds that “kids like their jobs better than they like school—because they feel very necessary at their jobs.”
Plus, Ballinger says, “It puts them around responsible peers…and gets them out of the bubble where Mommy and Daddy are protecting them. They have to do things on their own and impress a boss who maybe won’t give them slack, so they can learn to problem-solve.”
Future career
“It really helps their future careers as well,” says Ballinger, who likes to use her daughter as an example: She worked at Chick-fil-A during her last two years of high school, and when she went to college her food-industry experience helped her snag one of the higher-paying campus cafeteria jobs. That led to being put in touch with the university’s human resources director, who hired her as an assistant. “Now she’s in law school and had to get a summer internship—and while most of the first-year law students work for free, scrounging for something entry-level, she walked into a very well-paid, higher-experience law summer job at an HR firm,” due to that college experience.
“She didn’t plan to be in HR but she loves it now, and that job in high school opened doors for her in her later career—something I’ve seen with patients too,” she says. “It can open doors you cannot even imagine.”
That tracks with the findings of an earlier study, which looked at data of work history for over 256,000 Canadian young people. It found teens in part-time jobs progress to better-suited careers, as the early exposure to work helped them hone their preferences—as well as enhance their soft skills, acquire better references, and learn how to job-hunt more successfully.
Further, says Sasser Modestino, working helps youth learn more about the jobs they like and don’t like. Her kids, for example, spent time working in a pasta factory one summer. “It’s hard work—you’re standing up all day, wearing a hair net.” School suddenly looked a lot more fun. “That’s a great motivator,” she says. “Just by having that on-the-job experience, you learn a lot about where you want to end up in life and what it takes to get there.”
Budgeting
Earning their own money can help young people learn basic lessons about what things cost and how to budget for them. “Suddenly, $40 or $60 for a top, they begin to understand,” says Greenberg. “It teaches them the meaning of money.”
A 2023 OppLoans survey of 1,000 young people aged 14 to 24, in fact, found that just landing the job was already helping them figure out how to budget. Of those who responded, 63% had a job lined up for the summer—and planned to make an average of $4,037 by September and save 57% ($2,301) of it, mainly for living expenses (25%), tuition (20%), travel (18%), spending money (17%), helping out family (16%), and 4% “other” reasons.
“Getting your first paycheck is an incredible learning in terms of not only all paperwork it takes to get hired but also how to manage your money,” says Sasser Modestino. “They’re realizing when taxes get taken out and how to even cash the check—a lot of times it’s their first time setting up bank accounts and learning about direct deposit and how much to save.”
Academic outcomes
Youth who get hired when school’s out may do better academically once classes resume, according to a 2023 study by Sasser Modestino and Richard Paulsen published in the journal Education Finance and Policy. It looked at the school performance of teens from low-income neighborhoods who won one of the 10,000 Boston Summer Youth Employment Program lottery slots to be matched with summer work—typically at city agencies, nonprofits, camps, and parks—and found that those who got jobs through the program were 7% more likely to graduate from high school on time and 22% less likely to drop out of high school during the four years after participating in the program relative to a control group (students not offered job slots). There was also a slight advantage (of 6.8%) in grade-point averages for those who had the jobs.
And while it was the structured, career-focused employment program jobs that seemed to have to most benefit in terms of adult mentors and practical lessons, “working is better than not working,” Sasser Modestino says. “So even in the Summer Youth Employment Program, we have those entry-level, camp-counselor type jobs, but those are the jobs you need to have first to learn how to show up on time, how to work as a team.”
Her findings correlate with those of an earlier, similar study, on New York’s Summer Youth Employment Program and its effects on over 200,000 participants. Stanford University lead researcher Jacob Leos-Urbel noted that taking part in the program had a “positive, albeit small, effect” on taking and passing the standardized tests administered by New York state to measure academic progress in high school. Further, he noted: “Our research showed that a summer youth employment program has positive and significant effects on academic outcomes, as well.”
Social-emotional skills
By getting a taste of employment, Greenberg says, “kids get a lot of skills—they learn about responsibility, they learn how to work as a team, how to work with a boss, how to deal with different types of employees. And it can teach you how to be with people of all ages.”
That’s all particularly important coming out of the pandemic. “A lot of kids were undersocialized because they had all those months of isolation, so there’s some catch-up that needs to be done with social-emotional skills,” such as practicing empathy, learning to problem-solve, how to communicate, and make decisions, all of which are necessary for connecting with others, she says.
A lot of teenagers, adds Ballinger, before getting a job, found it difficult to just talk to people, either in person or on the phone. “If they couldn’t text, it was very anxiety-inducing for them,” she says, “and so getting to these jobs had them practice talking to brand-new people, being polite—even being polite to people who are being difficult.”
And then there’s the important lesson of showing up on time—something Sasser Modestino says most kids mention learning when they give feedback on youth employment programs. “They say they learn, ‘If you show up five minutes late, don’t show up at all’,” she says. “That’s not something you learn in high school… But if you show up late to a job three times, you’re fired.”
