Catherwood LibraryILR School

As the pressure to gain admission to a top college increasingly dominates children?s lives at an ever younger age, more and more junior high and high school students are spending their summers doing internships and taking advanced placement and college courses in order to strengthen their college applications. As a result, the US Labor Department reports that the percentage of sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds starting jobs this summer will likely hit its lowest level in the fifty-four years that statistics on US workforce participation rates have been kept---while well over twice as many in that age group will enroll in academic programs as did a decade ago. This trend has many parents and teachers concerned that teenagers are not being giving the chance to develop emotional and social maturity, financial responsibility, and to just be kids.