It's conventional wisdom that having a job while in high school boosts wage-earning in later life, because the kids are learning skills they wouldn't leaarn in the classroom and, furthermore, are learning the value of work. And that's a thought I consoled myself with while I was flipping burgers at McDonald's and envying all the kids who didn't work. It was kind of a class thing -- if you had to work for a little spending money it meant your parents weren't well-off enough to spoil you.
Alas, that salary-increasing effect seems to have peaked:
A recent paper from economists Charles Baum and Christopher Ruhm found that for a cohort of kids who had jobs in the late 1970s, working for 20 hours a week in the senior year of high school yielded an 8.3 percent wage boost over their non-working high school buddies. For those who had jobs two decades later, in the late 90s, the boost was only 4.4 percent. This was true even when the researchers controlled for family background characteristics and student ability.
The most painful part: “Senior-year employment was predicted to decrease the probability of subsequently working in the relatively low-paid service sector for the 1979 cohort but to increase it for the 1997 cohort,” they write. They also found that the wage boost in the earlier cohort was largely limited to women, for reasons they could not determine.
The story also includes this fascinating tidbit. that only 3.2 million high school students work some kind of job, which means that 71 percent of high school students do not work. Wow, the economy is struggling even more than we thought, huh? Hey, let's hurry up witth that $15 minimum wage so we can kick a whole lot more of those irritating teens onto the unemployment line.
