The summer job loses its status as a rite of youth

Jack Brooks may look a middle-aged stockbroker on the surface, but beneath the starched shirt and tie beats the heart of a hometown hero, forged more than a quarter-century ago on his first summer job.

"Lifeguarding was my induction into life," said Brooks, who at 16 joined the Beach Patrol in Ocean City, N.J., and today is an associate vice president for investments at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. "I drank my first beer as a lifeguard. I had my first romantic encounter as a lifeguard. It was much more than a summer job. It was more than I ever dreamed."

Time was, much of teen-age America would have agreed: lifeguarding was the pluperfect summer billet.

Today, though, lifeguard jobs go begging, to the point where Ocean City has dipped deep into its personnel files and asked old-timers to come back and fill the empty stations. Brooks will return this summer on weekends, as will moonlighting lawyers, doctors, engineers and casino floorwalkers.

"If we had to depend on teen-aged kids, we'd be hurting," said Bud McKinley, Ocean City's assistant captain for operations.

As go the beaches of the Jersey Shore, so go the workplaces of the nation. For the last 10 years, fewer teen-agers and young adults have been venturing into the summer work force. Last year, even with desperate managers dangling finders' fees, tuition plans and other lures, just 62 percent of America's 16 million people between 16 and 19 years old were in the labor force, compared with a high of 71.8 percent in 1978. It is the lowest percentage since July 1965.

The trend is most pronounced among young men, whose summer employment rate of 65 percent is down from 73.5 percent in 1989 and the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping track in 1948.

The decline indicates that the lengthy economic expansion has given growing numbers of families the means to support their children as they learn new languages, travel and undertake other adventures, and many parents are proud to be able to offer their offspring opportunities they never had.

But the shift away from summer jobs also suggests that tens of thousands of teen-agers are missing out on what some consider a hallowed American coming-of-age experience and, arguably, a social leveler that gives the college-bound a fleeting taste of working- class life.

Droves of teen-agers and young adults have been signing up for summer school, from remedial reading and math to advanced-placement courses and exotic enrichment programs. In July 1994, 19.5 percent of Americans aged 16 to 19 were in school. By July 1999, 26.8 percent were.

A decade of unparalleled affluence may be prompting some parents to give youngsters money, reducing their need to work. For other teen- agers, the boom still means working, but in jobs that put them on career tracks more quickly, not in the sweaty, low-paid and mind- numbing slots that have long been the lot of many.

A summer's earnings will no longer make much of a dent in today's rapidly rising college expenses. The current intense competition for university admissions also appears to be a factor, with teen-agers using summers to add sizzle to their applications. It is assumed that music camp or a hands-on biology lab will impress more than a stint stocking shelves in a supermarket.

"It could be the result of the high-stakes testing that's been instituted in a lot of the states," said William Rodgers, chief economist at the Labor Department.

For adolescent-development specialists, the waning of the summer job comes as a surprise. Teachers, psychologists and occupational- health experts have been arguing for years that young Americans are working far too much for their own good.

But with a tide of teen-agers turning away from summer jobs, some are raising a new concern.

"It could mean that the social divide that's happening gets worse," suggested Jeffrey A. Joerres, president and chief executive of Manpower Inc., the big temporary-employment company. Joerres worked as a house painter on his summer vacations, he recalled, and bonded with a crew of tattooed and ponytailed men who were not going to college.

"If somebody asked me, `What did you learn?' I'd probably say, `Well, I learned to put up scaffolding,'" Joerres said. "But in fact, I was learning other lessons. There are some life experiences that go unlearned if you take the professional track all your life."

In today's tight labor market, though, college students who seek summer work through Manpower expect to get serious white-collar positions, Joerres said, and they are not disappointed.

"They've really shot themselves in the foot," said Brooks, who traces much of who he is today to his time under the sun as a lifeguard.

Brooks revered his first boss, "a big, barrel-chested guy who was in the Navy," he said.

"He had a soft side, but you always knew who was boss. I think, in a lot of ways, the management style I've adopted in my life is a lot like that old captain."

Not only that, Brooks said, but it was a partner from that first summer job who got him into financial services, and former lifeguards still round out his client list today.

But others see few such benefits in putting teen-agers to work.

"When you have your kids working as soon as they're 13, 14 years old, the spring just goes out of their step," said Theresa Miller, a mother and writer in Tatamy, Pa.

Miller's father had to work throughout high school to buy clothes, she said, and felt robbed of an adolescence. So when she was in high school, he let her try a paper route, but stopped her when she started looking tired. He promised she would not have to work again until she was out of college. Now she wants to do the same for her son, who went to science camp last summer and will study music this season.

"We've counseled him to be a kid as long as he can, and as long as we can afford it," she said.

There is a large and contentious body of scholarship on whether teen-agers should or should not be working.

Some research shows that working adolescents get worse grades, sleep less and are more prone to dropping out of school. But other studies show that working teen-agers stay in school longer, flounder less, do just as much homework and enjoy better mental health.

The effects seem to depend on the nature of the workplace. There is some evidence that young people thrive in well-ordered workplaces, where their assignments are clear and mature supervision is never far away.

But high stress and a lack of job supervision have been found to cause depression in teen-agers, and the effects can linger for years.

Dr. Barbara Schneider, a University of Chicago sociologist, conducted a survey of 7,000 teen-agers and concluded, among other things, that the healthy, teen-ager-friendly workplace is getting harder and harder to find.

Consider the car-loving youth who, 25 years ago, might have sought satisfyingly greasy summer work in a filling station, changing oil and tuning engines under the tutelage of an experienced mechanic.

Today, that youth probably cannot get such a job, Schneider said. Cars come with modular components, and repair garages want mechanics with junior college certificates.

And instead of avuncular mentors like Brooks' captain, today's teen-agers are apt to have supervisors not that much older than themselves, Schneider said. They get little training, make mistakes, and are yelled at by customers. Then they quit in frustration.

"It's really problematic," Schneider said.

Randstad North America, an Atlanta-based company that provides temporary staff members, recently studied generational attitudes and found that today's teen-agers, unlike their parents, want jobs where they are taught something.

"It's logical," said Daryl Evans, a Randstad marketing manager. "They grew up in an environment of technology changing every 12 minutes. There's this incredible motivation to keep up, or a fear of falling behind."

Sean Stevens, a junior at Georgetown University, is a good example. "I know it sounds arrogant, but my time is worth more than $8 or $10 an hour," he said. "I've got a whole lot of other things to do."

Stevens, who already speaks fluent Korean and Russian as well as good Japanese, Spanish and German, is leaving this weekend for a summer at a university in South Korea. He even managed to shoehorn in an internship at the World Bank in the four weeks between spring finals and his trans-Pacific flight.

"People want to make themselves look good on resumes," Stevens said. Just having a degree and a few summers waiting tables is no longer enough, he said. "You have to have a selling point, something to distinguish you from everybody else. You want to stand out."

But such sentiments do not always go down well with adults for whom low-skilled summer jobs were enough.

"To just spend more time reading American history and playing soccer is not the same as getting out into the world and having experiences," said Dr. David Davenport, the departing president of Pepperdine University in California, who admits he irritates faculty by asserting that he learned more frying doughnuts in his father's bakery than in any university. "We're crowding out the well-rounded development of our children."

Last summer, in keeping with his convictions, Davenport decided his daughter, Kate, should get a job as a chambermaid, even though Kate wanted to go to soccer camp.

"You'd think the world had come to an end," Davenport said. But he persisted and Kate ended up stripping beds and cleaning rooms at the conference center Pepperdine operates each summer on its Malibu campus.

Today, Kate does not even remember the fight about attending soccer camp. A summer of hard work and low prestige have left her sounding like a convert to her father's cause.

"At Malibu High School, most of the students were doing marine biology camps and SAT prep classes," she said dismissively. "I don't miss that environment at all."

Asked if her summer job gave her any thoughts about a career, the 17-year-old Davenport drew a blank. But as for what she plans to do this summer, she did not miss a beat.

"I've heard the money in construction is good, $10 an hour to start," she said. "I think it's important to know how to build things."

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