Why Teenagers Stopped Working in the Summer

Most of this is wrong, and a little economics shows why. The classic summer job has been disappearing for nearly half a century, ever since teen labor-force participation peaked at 57.9% in 1979. For most of that time the market for teenage labor didn’t get harder. It got easier. Teenagers left it on purpose—and understanding why they left, for whom and with what consequences turns a stale lament about kids these days into something more useful.

The share of 16- to 19-year-olds holding a job has fallen by a third since 1979, from 48.5% to 31.1%. Yet the teenage unemployment rate—the share of teens looking for work who can’t find it—is lower today, at 14%, than the 16% registered in 1979. Split that 17-point drop in employment into its sources, and the lopsidedness shows why: About 18 points come from teenagers leaving the workforce, while roughly 1 point pushes the other way, because those who do look now find work more easily. Teenagers didn’t lose jobs. They stopped wanting them.

These numbers exonerate this summer’s usual suspects of the long-run crime. A chatbot can’t explain a decline that began under Jimmy Carter. Tariffs and oil tankers don’t explain four decades of teenagers walking away from jobs they could have had.

This summer’s villains do explain something—just not the trend. Over the past two years the teen unemployment rate has risen, from about 11% to more than 14%, as seasonal hiring at restaurants and amusement parks pulled back and automation crept into the entry rung. That demand-side softening is real and new. But it is a two-year tremor atop a 45-year trend that runs the other way, and the error nearly every commentator makes is to mistake the tremor for the trend.

Why did they leave? The price of a teenager’s time changed, sharply. The wage premium a college degree brings roughly doubled between the late 1970s and 2000, from about 40% to nearly 80%. The hour a 16-year-old once spent folding shirts at the Gap now carries a much higher opportunity cost; spend it instead on anything that bends the arc toward college, and the lifetime payoff is significantly larger. Meanwhile the reward for the folding shrank: The federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is worth about 40% less than at its 1968 peak. Enrollment rose as a consequence, but school can’t be the whole story: The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that between 2000 and 2015, labor-force participation fell even among teens not enrolled in school, from 76% to 65%.

Teen employment has never been evenly distributed; it rises with family income. In the summer of 2023, 46% of teenagers from families earning between $100,000 and $150,000 held a job. Among teens from the poorest families, earning under $30,000, only about a quarter did.

For the affluent teenager, skipping the paycheck is genuine optimization. She trades the lifeguard chair for a research internship, science camp, an SAT tutor. Economists Shirley Porterfield and Anne Winkler found the retreat steepest in exactly the most educated, highest-income households—and the substitutes those families reach for, the unpaid internship and the enrichment program, are precisely the ones a low-income family can’t afford.

For the poor teen, “choice” is usually the wrong word, because the teenagers who most need a summer job are the ones who can’t find one. In 2025 New York City’s summer-jobs program—the nation’s largest—drew roughly 200,000 applications for about 100,000 slots, and rationed them by lottery. Economist Alexander Gelber and his collaborators, studying those lotteries, found that winning a slot raised a teenager’s chance of working that summer by 71 percentage points—direct evidence of how many wanted jobs they couldn’t otherwise get.

Which returns us to the ice-cream shop. Those turned-away applicants in Cape Cod aren’t evidence that the market collapsed—the unemployment numbers contradict that—they’re evidence of something sharper: The kids who still need these jobs are competing for a shrinking pool of the work they can get, while the affluent peers who once stood in line beside them are off investing in their futures.

That head start isn’t even the most concerning part. Sara Heller studied Chicago’s jobs program and found that an eight-week summer job cut violent-crime arrests among disadvantaged teenagers by 43%, with the effect growing after the job ended. Mr. Gelber and his co-authors, studying New York’s program, matched roughly 290,000 lottery records to tax and death records and found that winning a summer job cut the risk of dying over the following years by about 18%, driven by fewer homicides, particularly among young men. Those same New York jobs, however, didn’t raise the kids’ later earnings; if anything they nudged them down slightly and left college-going untouched.

The summer I turned 15—deep in the knuckleheadery of my youth—I bagged groceries at an Albertsons in Lewisville, Texas, for $4.35 an hour, not to build a résumé but to put a little money in my pocket and have somewhere to be during the long afternoons when my friends and I tended to find trouble. Albertsons was no temple of human-capital formation. I spent a good share of my shifts throwing tight spirals to kids in the produce section. But structure for a teenager who might otherwise drift and cash for a family with none to spare are exactly the two things the lottery studies say matter most. That minimum-wage job might have been one of the most valuable things that ever happened to me.

The vanishing summer job is two experiences buried in one statistic. For most American teenagers, the decline is a rational bet on a future that rewards their time elsewhere. For the kid I once was, the same number means the opposite. If we’re going to worry about the disappearing summer job, let’s worry about the teenagers who need it most. For them it has been a matter of life and death for decades—and that is the one thing no one is talking about.

Mr. Fryer, a Journal contributor, is a professor of economics at Harvard, a founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.