The Death of the Summer Job

> ...the jobless rate reached 20.1 per cent, a level not seen since May 2009.

This seems to be the whole premise of the article, but then the barchart right below shows similar levels for 2009-2015 (at least 19% in each year), and >40% in 2020 and ~23% in 2021 (COVID years but we don't know what they would have been without COVID).

The quoted numbers below are different so something is amiss.

So does not seem so unusual, and regularly hits these levels.

For undergraduate college students spending only 3-4 years in college, the timing will certainly bias their experience, but I really can't imagine there weren't "thousands of students" scrambling to get a summer job even when the rate was 15%.

An article like this could have provided a nice contribution by finding a baseline: a poll about how many students did not even plan to work a summer job?

There are many problems with the labor market in the U.S., but my daughter and her friends are able to get summer jobs (she's 19). Is this just a Canadian thing, or is this part of the job market different in Austin, TX (where I live) vs. other parts of the U.S.? The market for unemployed middle-aged adults looking for permanent work is slow, but the summer job market for college students (in Austin) seems pretty good.

Just in case the link doesn't work: https://web.archive.org/web/20250612155236/https://financial...