Teens from upper-income families are far more likely to work summer jobs than poor teens. What's going on?

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15 hours ago

Twin brothers Alex and Nicolas Alessi and their friend Mason Grant — all 17-year-old rising high-school seniors in the Bay Area — were having a hard time finding jobs leading up to this summer.
'We probably applied to 20 jobs, and we did not get any of them,' Alex said of himself and his brother.
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Grant, meanwhile, struggled to advance beyond the initial stages of the interview process, including at retailers. 'You need multiple references, experience, past history — and as a high-school kid who's very busy with other stuff, it's hard to get your foot in the door,' he told MarketWatch.
The three friends, seeing a need to connect high-schoolers to work opportunities, recently developed a job board targeting teens called JobMatch, with the twins' father, Tom Alessi, acting as an adviser.
'At our school, our nicknames are the Winklevoss twins and Mark Zuckerberg,' Grant said.
Users anywhere can post jobs and search free. The site is currently being used by hundreds of people in the community, according to the founders, and all three of them have also applied to and landed gigs on JobMatch themselves.
'On any given day you will find them washing cars, pulling weeds, helping people move, etc.,' said Tom Alessi, who leads software engineering for Johnson & Johnson Vision. 'Honestly, it's super lucrative for them.'
Teen employment in the U.S. has been declining for decades — the employment-to-population ratio for 16- to 19-year-olds was 37.9% last July, not seasonally adjusted, down from a high of 59.9% in July 1979, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many working teens today come from higher-income families that encourage them to seek learning opportunities outside of the classroom.
'A young person from a family with a higher income is more likely to be employed during the summer months than a young person from a family earning less,' according to a Labor Department study posted in 2024.
About 44% of 16- to 19-year-olds from families earning $150,000 or more — roughly the top fifth of U.S. households by income — were employed from June to August 2023, the most recent year for which estimates were available. By contrast, only 27% of teens from families earning less than $30,000, or roughly the lowest fifth of households by income, had summer employment during that time.
Tom Alessi, Alex's and Nicolas's father, has noticed this trend playing out in their high-income community. 'The parents from affluent families — we call them 'snowplows' — are out in front of their kids plowing the 'snow' out of the way,' he said.
Grant, the twins' friend, said he knows a teen whose father was able to connect the teen and his friend with jobs at the golf course where the father is a member. 'I am not saying the kids didn't work hard, but they put it on a silver platter for them,' he said.
The employment gap between teens from high- and low-income families is a longstanding disparity. Kids from higher-income families tend to have greater access to a car or to an adult who can drive them to work, a BLS report from 2000 said. The researchers also noted that 'nonmarket work such as housework and unpaid child care' more often falls to teens in lower-income families, making them 'relatively less available for market work — or available only for specific schedules.'
In addition, some teens from low-income families live in labor markets with fewer opportunities, according to a 2010 report from Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies.
The gap became more pronounced in the 2000s. While teens in every income group experienced sharp declines in summer employment between 2000 and 2008, teens from low-income families experienced the sharpest decline, the Center for Labor Market Studies said. By 2010, 'the employment rate for upper-middle-income white teens was four times as high as that for low-income Black teens,' the center later reported.
Read more: Generation Z thinks it needs $500,000 a year to succeed. What that says about our economy.
Kyle Ross, a policy analyst at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, wrote in a 2023 report that youth facing barriers to employment 'such as a low-income background, a disability, or low English proficiency' need access to resources that help build the skills and experience necessary to get a job and achieve their future career goals.
One federal law that subsidized youth employment, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, has relied on temporary extensions after expiring in 2020 and may face cuts in the new spending bill in Congress, which may harm youth who need extra support accessing opportunities in the labor force, Ross told MarketWatch. The Trump administration last month announced that it would pause all contractor-operated centers at Job Corps, a WIOA program to train young people from low-income households, by the end of the month, citing 'a startling number of serious incident reports and our in-depth fiscal analysis.' (The pause was later delayed by a court order.)
As the economy evolves to demand different skill sets for different kinds of jobs, 'a lot of people end up suffering because they're left out,' Ross said.
Today, young college graduates, older workers and foreign-born workers are competing for jobs that were traditionally held by teens, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those between 16 and 19 made up 18.7% of minimum-wage workers in 2023, down from 25.4% two decades earlier.
As entry-level wages stagnated over the years, employers incentivized young people to get more degrees. Many jobs once paid a living wage to workers with high-school diplomas, but that has changed. Among full-time workers ages 35 to 44, those who completed high school had average annual earnings of nearly $58,000 in 2023, compared with about $105,000 for those with a bachelor's degree, according to the Census Bureau.
With such a stark wage gap between workers with and without college degrees, more young Americans have shifted their focus to education — including during summers. The share of 16- to 19-year-olds enrolled in school in July has been above 40% every year since 2007 — except in 2013, when it was 39.3% — and hit 48.4% in July 2024, according to calculations using BLS data. That share was just 10.4% in July 1985.
'Over the long term, there's just been more educational upgrading,' said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. She also noted that teen employment tends to be higher during stronger business cycles, when opportunities are more abundant and employers are willing to hire people with less experience and do more on-the-job training.
Yet as competition for entry-level jobs heats up, some parents, including those who earn higher incomes, believe that school alone does not prepare teens professionally or financially.
Marilou Davido, a financial planner and vice president of WFA Asset Management, told MarketWatch her kids are 'in a good school district and have lots of opportunities to pad their transcripts' with AP courses. As she and her husband have been saving for college since their children were born, 'I'm not as focused on summer academics because I'm not expecting or needing my kids to get a scholarship for college.'
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Davido said she worries 'that my husband and I spoil our kids. They have much more than I ever did growing up,' she said. So she has pushed her 16-year-old son, Luca, to learn the value of money through work and to recognize that his 'normal' is not shared by everyone else — and will change when he is no longer 'riding Mom's and Dad's coattails.' She also hopes having a job will teach him 'how to talk with his boss, negotiate and compromise.'
Luca refereed hockey games over the winter, earning at least $45 per hour, and recently shucked corn at a fair for $15 an hour plus tips, which he described as 'really good money.' Davido contributes a match equal to his earnings into a Roth IRA she and her husband opened for him, which they hope will compound significantly in the decades ahead.
Luca told MarketWatch that he is required to take a personal-finance course in school. When his parents recently started sharing the actual dollar figures of their household finances, he said, he became worried that he would not be able to support an equivalent lifestyle when he graduates from college.
Luca is saving and investing his earnings from his jobs to have 'a bit more of a head start to buy things and just deal with issues that might come up' as a young adult, he said. By mid-June, he was still looking for a summer job. 'I want to start my financial life. Start making money,' he said.
Other parents also see the opportunity for teen jobs to kick-start a comfortable retirement in the future. Michael Cochran, a financial planner and chief investment officer at BentOak Capital, told MarketWatch he has two children, 13 and 15. For their older son, who works at a tennis pro shop, 'we introduced a Roth IRA 'match' to encourage saving and help instill strong financial habits early,' he said. Their younger son is earning about $100 a week doing tasks around the neighborhood.
Cochran's goal, he said, 'is to demonstrate that consistent work and even modest contributions — and a 'match' from his parents — can lead to meaningful long-term benefits, both through the power of compounding and by building a strong foundation in financial literacy.'
Teen summer employment remains concentrated in jobs as waitstaff, recreation workers, fast-food workers, coaches, child-care workers and construction laborers, according to the Labor Department.
As today's youth face a job market that stands to be disrupted by technologies such as artificial intelligence, some high-income parents are encouraging their children to practice skills that will be useful for starting their own businesses.
'Some of these kids are saying, 'I don't want a traditional job where I make $15 an hour. I don't want a limit on what I can do, or when I can work. I want to make my own rules,' Tom Alessi, the father of the JobMatch co-founders, told MarketWatch.
'I am super frustrated, so is my wife, that the high school doesn't teach any [real-world] skills. They only teach academics for academics' sake,' he said. 'They do not teach these kids that there's another path, if they so choose, like entrepreneurship.' It's fine that many students choose a traditional employment path, he added, but schools are doing students 'a disservice' by not teaching them that 'there's a different way to earn money' besides being an employee.
While Tom is a full-time employee, his wife runs her own business as a physical therapist, he said, adding that 'the kids have always done jobs at her clinic — laundry, cleanup, office work.'
Helping his kids with JobMatch, he added, has felt 'like a traditional startup.' 'It's chaotic. Everybody has ideas,' he said. 'But I'm trying to teach them skills that they're not going to learn anywhere [else]: Here's how you get customer feedback; here's how you shape a product road map; here's how you push out features; here's how long it takes to develop features; here's how you engage with people.'
Grant said starting JobMatch has also opened up networking opportunities to him. 'I want to work, and I want to meet new people,' he said. Nicolas and Alex said that because their parents still provide for their needs, they plan to give 90% of any earnings from their jobs, as well as any cash gifts they receive, to their father to invest for their futures. Their goal, they said, is to start a successful business together. As other teens put school at the center of their goals, the twins are going to college and investing early as 'backups' in case their entrepreneurial efforts don't work out.
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