Summer employment among teenagers has substantially declined in recent decades, but why? In a new insight, Labor Policy Analyst Emmet Bowling discusses the decline in teenage summer employment and the simultaneous increase in teens pursuing summer education.

Key points:

• The employment-to-population ratio among 16- to 19-year-olds during July—generally the month with the highest level of teenage employment—dropped from an average of 55 percent from 1948–1999 to 38.8 percent from 2000–2026, a decline of 16.2 percentage points.
• Data suggest that this drop stems from a declining summer labor force participation rate rather than a growing inability to find work, as the July labor force participation rate among 16- to 19-year-olds fell by 18.3 percentage points between the two periods while the unemployment rate increased only modestly.
• Evidence suggests that an important reason teenagers are participating less in the summer labor market than they were in prior generations is their increased enrollment in summer school—as July school enrollment among 16- to 19-year-olds increased from 10.4–42.1 percent from 1985–2016.

Read the analysis.