When Rich Harrill was 17, his dad came to him one day just after the school year ended.
“And he said, ‘Be ready in the morning.’ I said, ‘Where are we going?’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’” he said.
The next day, Harrill’s dad dropped him off at a peach farm on the edge of their town in South Carolina. That’s where Harrill worked for the next seven summers. “Working in the shed, working in the field — whatever was needed.”
Harrill is now a professor of hospitality at the University of South Carolina. Even though that’s a world away from peach farming, he said says those summers taught him something.
“Things I needed later in life — perseverance and discipline,” he said. These soft skills are a crucial benefit of summer jobs.
“This is what teaches good work habits,” said Alicia Modestino, a professor of public policy at Northeastern University.
Good things come to students who work summers, she said. “Their attendance at school increases and they’re less likely to fail courses.”
Plus, they see higher average earnings in the future. Youth employment surged in the summers after the COVID lockdowns, Modestino said.
“Suddenly, we decided to reopen the entire world,” she said. “And we had this amazing boom in youth employment where we got to a really low unemployment rate. Summer of 2023, we were down to 10%.”
Now though, unemployment for teenagers is up to more than 13%. June tends to be the peak hiring month for summer jobs — that rite of passage for teenagers just starting out in the workforce.
But this year could see fewer summer jobs available, according to a report from the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
“What we’re seeing is the general cooling off of the labor market. And unfortunately, youth are the leading indicator here,” Modestino said. “So they are always the last to be hired, the first to be fired.”
There are just fewer summer jobs available for them this year, according to Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab.
“And a lot of that is, you know, because of what I’m sure everyone is sick of hearing, and that’s economic uncertainty,” she said.
With tariffs and travel restrictions, Shrivastava said businesses just don’t know how much demand they’re gonna see this summer. So they’re more hesitant to staff up.
“Postings for summer jobs even started a little bit later this year. You know, people really held off,” she said.
But beyond the chaos of this particular summer, there’s another force that could reduce work opportunities for teens, per Nicole Smith, an economist at Georgetown. And that’s automation.
“That’s a slow-moving tsunami that has eaten up a lot of the repetitious, entry-level teen jobs,” she said.
Think: the grocery store check-out counter. “Retail stores, they now have all of these machines and you don’t necessarily need a human being.”
There are still some summer jobs that require a human touch, though. Robot lifeguards probably aren’t coming to a pool near you any time soon.
