4 ways summer jobs have changed over the years

Believe it or not, the likelihood of a robot taking your kid's future summer job is pretty high.

According to a recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, low-wage, entry-level positions are the first to be compromised by the rise of artificial intelligence.

"A striking novel finding is that the risk of automation is the highest among teenage jobs," the study said. "The relationship between automation and age is U-shaped, but the peak in automatability among youth jobs is far more pronounced than the peak among senior workers."

Plain and simple: Some adolescents just don't want to work.

Call it laziness, entitlement, or whatever you want, but The Atlantic says that many of today's teenagers are foregoing their summer paychecks for something even more productive.

Read more: Amazon has so many summer interns, it costs $4.4 million to feed and house them and Seattle has to add extra city buses

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, summer school enrollment for this same age group has tripled in the past 20 years, and started increasing around the same time teen employment started going down. Similar to the trend in high schoolers taking up internships, it seems a hefty portion of Generation Z is actually willing to trade spending money for a better education these days.

Even if today's teens wanted to flip burgers at the diner like their grandparents did, many of those romanticized summer jobs aren't even available anymore.

The 2018 Teen Summer Job Report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas showed that hiring of 16- to 19-year-olds fell a whole 4% in 2017. Andrew Challenger, Vice President of the executive outplacement firm, said it could be because so many big-name retailers (Toys R Us, for instance) are going out of business.

Another challenge for youth workers is, according to data from the Center of Economic and Policy Research, competing with an older generation. The fast food industry that once hired out entire high schools over the summer now employ twice as many 20- to 54-year-olds as teens.