Teen Employment Falls In September 2022

Last month’s unexpected surge in the number of teens with jobs has largely dissipated. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the number of employed teens dropped by 213,000, falling to a seasonally adjusted 5,565,000 in September 2022.

The following chart indicates most of that decline occurred among younger teens while older teens saw a much smaller month-over-month reduction.

Readers should note that each data series in this chart has been put through its own seasonal adjustment by the BLS’s analysts, which is why the figures for the Age 16-17 and Age 18-19 subgroups don’t add up to the total for the Age 16-19 population. The non-seasonally adjusted data does, which shows much larger month-over-month reductions for all groups than what’s indicated in the chart. The factor that accounts for why the seasonal adjustment works that way is the annual start of the school year in September, which sees teens return to classrooms across the U.S.

Looking at the chart showing the employed-to-population percentages for each of these groups shows the effect of an interesting demographic quirk.

Here, we find the seasonally adjusted share of working Age 16-17 teens declined, as might be expected, but the percentage of Age 18-19 teens with jobs increased to the highest level shown in the data. Since the seasonally adjusted data shows declines for both groups, the only way that can happen is if the estimated population of Age 18-19 year olds shrank during the month. Which, thanks to a quirk of statistical noise in the BLS’s household survey data, is exactly what happened!

Finally, the topline seasonally adjusted numbers for the September 2022 employment situation report indicate 158,936,000 Americans are employed, a month-over-month increase of 204,000 with the unemployment rate falling from 3.7% to 3.5%. The teen unemployment rate jumped from 10.4% to 11.4% in this period, consistent with how it has varied during the past year.

Reference

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey – CPS). [Online Database.] Accessed: 7 October 2022.

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