For teenagers, what happened to the summer job?

Seventeen-year-old Evan Black will spend much of this summer at Rockwood Pool, but not relaxing on a lounge chair and sipping lemonade.

“As a lifeguard you have to do a lot of interacting with other people, and you have to be assertive,” said Black, assistant manager at the east Wichita pool.

“It can be challenging at times, but it’s fun. … And it’s good practice for when you’re an adult out in the real world.”

Black is part of a dwindling number of American teenagers working a paying job during the summer or year-round.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, teen employment has shown a downward trend over the past three decades, plunging dramatically when the recession hit and not bouncing back when the rest of the labor market recovered.

The bureau predicts the teen labor force participation rate will drop below 27 percent in 2024, compared with more than 55 percent in 1980. Last summer, just 35 percent of teens were working or looking for work.

What happened to the summer job? Theories abound.

Some blame a lackluster youth job market, or the fact that more adults are working past retirement and crowding teens out of the workforce. Others say teens have decided that working for minimum wage – $7.25 an hour – doesn’t make a dent in college tuition, so why bother?

But there’s another trend happening, according to researchers, educators and parents:

More teens – particularly those from middle- and upper-class families – are unemployed by choice, opting to spend their summers volunteering, attending camps, cramming for college entrance exams or taking enrichment classes.

“I do see more and more kids kind of shirking work or being very quote-unquote ‘picky’ about the kind of work they get,” said Jennifer Stark Fry, a retired Wichita teacher and owner of College Matters KS, a business that helps high school students with the college selection and application process.

“It is a challenge balancing school and activities with work, but it’s such an important learning experience for kids to do that. That’s where you interface with a lot of different people you wouldn’t normally interface with, and you learn to take criticism.”

Jeffrey Selingo, author of “There Is Life After College,” argued in a recent piece for the Washington Post that, “If we want our kids to start growing up like earlier generations, we should begin putting them to work as teenagers.”

Fry agreed, saying today’s intense focus on academics over the summer months could have the opposite effect teens and parents intend.

Part-time jobs – particularly “gritty jobs” in landscaping or the service industry, Fry said, as opposed to clerking at your dad’s law office – can set students apart from their peers in the college admissions process.

At a recent seminar for college counselors, an admissions dean from Harvard University said parents often ask, “What can I do to get my kid into Harvard?”

His answer: “Have them pump gas.”

“He was the first in his family to go to college, and guess what his father did for a living? He owned a gas station,” Fry said.

“Part of his theory was that a lot of these kids who are from affluent homes and are kind of pampered really don’t understand the world of work at all and how to relate with lots of different types of people.”

Black, the Wichita lifeguard, said she began working as a babysitter for extra spending money when she was about 11 years old. She later sought a summer job because she wanted regular paychecks and a consistent schedule, she said, but she also has gleaned valuable life skills.

“It teaches responsibility. It teaches a good work ethic,” said Black, whose duties have included greeting customers, cleaning bathrooms and teaching swim lessons.

A recent high school graduate, she plans to study humanities at Trinity International University in the fall.

“As a teenager, especially in the summer, the stakes are pretty low,” she said. “So a summer job prepares you as a good entry-level for something you’re going to have to do for the rest of your life.”

Brandon Bousquet, an engineer at Textron Aviation in Wichita, worked part-time at a movie theater throughout high school and college, going from scooping popcorn and taking tickets to running projection machines and training new employees.

Now a professional with a master’s degree, he continues to work Sundays at the theater because he likes movies and the friends he’s made there. He jokes that his weekend job still keeps him out of trouble.

“It was extremely valuable to my growth as a teenager,” said Bousquet, 28, who graduated from Derby High School.

“When you’re in high school, you’re told what to do and when. This was kind of like my first step toward personal responsibility, learning to do things for myself and what real life is like after high school.”

The most difficult part at first, Bousquet said, was saying no to fun stuff when he was scheduled to work.

“The biggest thing is learning that your time isn’t free,” he said. “If your friends want to go do something, you’re like, ‘Well, I have this responsibility now. I have to think about this first because other people are counting on me.’

“That was a good thing to learn as a high-schooler.”

Fry said activities such as enrichment camps, mission trips and ACT-prep courses can be valuable and look good on a college application. But students and parents shouldn’t discount the value of an old-fashioned summer job.

In addition to the soft skills many employers want, teens in the workforce learn practical things such as completing tax forms, depositing paychecks and managing finances.

“Parents and students need to really think outside the box about experiences that teach life lessons that can be of great use when students go off to college and learn to make those life adjustments,” Fry said.

“A real job can be a lot more impressive to the college admissions folks and useful down the road than a series of camps that kids have been put in.”

This story was originally published June 23, 2017 at 6:27 PM with the headline "For teenagers, what happened to the summer job?."