A couple of weeks ago, Danielle Kurtzleben wrote an interesting, short piece over at Vox today about the disappearance of teenager summer jobs. It was a good piece, but I don't think it quite gets at the most important stuff. I want to sketch out two stories, of Jill and Karen.
In 2000, Jill and Karen enter high school. Jill comes from a family of means; her parents both work and make $150,000 per year combined, and she has only one sibling. Jill is smart and has very good grades. Karen enters high school and has very good grades as well. But Karen's father left when she was 3 and her younger sister was an infant. Her mom works 50 hours a week and pulls in $40,000 a year. So they're doing OK, but it's a tough go of it.
As first year high school students, Jill and Karen both excel. Jill goes to a two-week summer camp that specializes in piano. Karen stays home around the house for much of the summer.
Jill and Karen both do very well as sophomores. The following summer, Karen nabs a job at a snack bar at a local public pool. Jill spends three weeks volunteering in another Western Hemisphere country.
Karen wants more money, so she works 15 hours per week at a local McDonalds starting in her junior year. She ups her hours for the summer to 40 hours per week. Jill, on the other hand, takes a SAT prep course to get ready for her SATs.
They're both smart, so they both do well on their SATs. Karen gets a solid 1400. Jill gets a 1440, with the help of that course.
Skip ahead a bit, college rolls around. Karen gets a substantial financial aid package and leverages it to go to a Northeastern liberal arts school, Haverford. Using her experience in the Dominican Republic as the foundation of her essay, Jill gets into Harvard. Both fell in love with All the Presidents' Men and want to be political journalists.
Both continue to excel freshman year as political science majors. Karen comes home to work at McDonalds for the summer, because her savings account is entirely depleted from some of the expenses that emerged while she was in college. (Traveling home, school supplies, eating out with friends a few times). Jill, meanwhile, takes an unpaid internship for a media company in Washington, DC. Her room and board is subsidized by her parents.
Karen decides that she isn't really interested in journalism at this stage, having caught up with her friend Jill and heard about the cutthroat environment in DC. She decides that she'd rather transition into a more practical field. She drops polisci and picks up biology, with the ambition to work for a biological research firm.
Their college careers play out in a similar way; both get good grades (though Jill's are stronger, because political science is easier than biology). Karen grows more comfortable in her bio classes and finishes with a strong 3.75. Jill gets the vaunted 4.0 and is offered a junior position with the Atlantic in Washington. Karen takes a position with a pharmaceutical company as a lab worker.
Both successes, right?
I would say "absolutely, yes." But a big part of that success for Karen was the $15,000-$20,000 or so that she pulled in over the 4-5 years she was working at McDonalds and at that pool snack bar. Those experiences were really important to her development for a few reasons. At the most basic level, the spending money itself represented a vast improvement in her quality of life. She could afford to go to the movies periodically, or to see her favorite bands play, or to meet up with friends for late night half price appetizers, or whatever it is that young adults like to do. But more importantly, they also taught her the importance of work and the need to be realistic about her career goals.
We read this story and say that Jill was lucky to have the advantages she had growing up, and that's certainly a piece of it. But Karen is very lucky too, because she was able to leverage her talent into a potentially productive career. Karen shouldn't have any resentment about the way things turned out.
But in a world without those part time jobs, things are pretty different for Karen:
- Karen is short $15,000 over several years, which translates from "enough money to buy things sometimes" to "basically no money at all."
- Karen probably gets less useful life experience.
- Karen might get depressed by not being able to participate in things.
- Karen might wallow in self-pity and lose her initiative and spark.
Now all of a sudden we have a very different person in Karen.
My point is: when you have these discussions about low-wage jobs for young people, it's Karen's story that matters. Jill doesn't need that job; she'll be successful by taking the unpaid internship path. My fear is that, for all of their inclusive liberalism, most of the journalists we have that take interest in these stories are a lot like Jill, who got into the field because they had the necessary scaffolding from family and relatives along the way. But not everyone does. And those are the people who need these part time jobs.
Full disclosure: I identify more with Karen than Jill here, though I didn't switch to biology. And I don't resent that, even a little. But I sure as heck would be a lot worse off if not for the supermarket jobs I carried through most of my college breaks. (I was working as a cashier during my winter break even as a college senior.)
** I used women here because I try to avoid gender bias in my writing. But part-time jobs may even be more important for men than women, many of whom face a persistent social expectation of paying for dates.
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