Is your child considering getting a job this coming summer? At our nation’s current inflection point, aptly deemed The Great Resignation, there seem to be quite a few job openings for teenagers. Heck, there was a piece in The Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago shining a light on how teenage babysitters are now making upwards of $30 per hour — double what they made just before the pandemic. And it’s not like babysitting is the only sector in need of high schoolers this coming summer. Summer jobs are plentiful!

As Madison Hoff reports for Business Insider in a piece entitled “Young Gen Zers are ‘flocking’ to summer jobs as businesses desperate to fight the Great Resignation offer higher pay and require less experience,” “Employers have been raising their pay to address staffing problems amid the labor shortage and the Great Resignation — and teenagers looking for work are taking notice. ‘One of the reasons teens are flocking to the labor market is because this labor shortage has driven up wages at the bottom,’ Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told Insider. ‘And it has driven them up particularly in these kinds of industries, these face-to-face industries like leisure and hospitality, where many workers left because of COVID risks.’ As of the latest monthly data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average wages of production and nonsupervisory workers in leisure and hospitality, which has historically been a lower-paying industry, has increased from $15.59 an hour in April 2021 to $17.56 an hour a year later in April 2022.”

And if you’re wondering what we at Ivy Coach think about high schoolers securing summer jobs, know that we’re all for it. Indeed, from atop our soapbox in college admissions, we have long argued that summer jobs are a great way to stand out and inspire admissions officers to root for applicants. We especially love it when the summer job a student secures fits their hook. Think about it. Is an Ivy League admissions officer going to be rooting for the student whose parents paid $12,000 to send them to a fancy summer enrichment camp at an elite university or are they going to root for the student who earned $20 an hour working in the hot sun? All else being equal, our bet is always on the summer job holder every time out of ten.