One reason you may not see teens flipping burgers or lifeguarding this summer

The share of teens spending their summers working in ice cream shops, fast food restaurants or as lifeguards at the local pool recently hit a 50-year low. New research offers one explanation for the change.

When a state introduces a very selective state scholarship program — defined as requiring students to have at least a 3.5 grade point average — it reduces the share of teens participating in the labor market by nearly 4 percentage points, a working paper circulated this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests.

Though selective state merit-aid programs may be playing a role in the decline in teens taking traditional jobs, it’s not the case that state scholarship programs overall have that power, the researchers found. The decline in teen employment has happened even though there’s been a rise in state-funded merit-based scholarship programs during the same period, said David Frisvold, one of the authors of the study and an economics professor at the University of Iowa. Instead, it appears that the level of selectivity of a scholarship program is key to its influence on teens; the higher the GPA requirement of a scholarship program, the less likely teens are to participate in the labor force, the study found.

“It does seem like the differences in these programs do influence youth behavior,” he said. A scholarship program with more rigorous criteria could push students to spend more time improving their grades by studying, participating in certain activities at school or other behaviors, instead of working, the researchers speculate.

The study adds to the complex web of reasons why teens may not be participating in the summer rite of passage as much as they did in the past.

Experts have speculated that immigrants and older workers, who became increasingly likely to take the types of jobs traditionally held by teens during the Great Recession, may be crowding young people out. It’s also possible that in today’s climate of heightened ambition, teens are more likely to look for gigs that burnish their resume for college, like internships or volunteer work.

Finally, given today’s college costs, teens may recognize that any money they earn doing minimum wage work will simply be a drop in the bucket once they reach campus. That’s where the availability of these scholarships come in.

“You have this trade-off between working and spending time in school or school-related tasks that are going to influence your GPA,” Frisvold said, and when a state puts a scholarship opportunity on the table that requires teens to meet certain eligibility criteria, “it becomes more valuable to spend your time in school making sure that you meet these thresholds to qualify for merit aid,” he added.