“The share of teens with summer jobs has plunged since 2000, and the type of work they do has shifted. As recently as the turn of the 21st century, roughly half of U.S. teens could expect to spend at least part of their summer vacation lifeguarding, dishing up soft-serve ice cream, selling T-shirts or otherwise working. But the share of teens working summer jobs has tumbled since 2000: Despite some recovery since the end of the Great Recession, about a third of teens (35%) had a job last summer. To understand what’s happened to the Great American Summer Job, Pew Research Center looked at the average employment rate (known as the employment-population ratio) for 16- to 19-year-olds in June, July and August. (We used non-seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for this analysis; teen employment rises sharply in the summer months, typically peaking in July.) From the late 1940s, which is as far back as the data go, through the 1980s, teen summer employment followed a fairly regular pattern: rising during economic good times and falling during and after recessions, but generally fluctuating between 46% (the low, in 1963) and 58% (the peak, in 1978)…”