When I was 16 - 18 I worked 15 hours a week as a busboy. When I was 19 I went into the Marine Corps. Just how much “work” do teenagers want/need?? What am I missing here?!
It depends. The 16-19 age group includes kids trying to work their way through college or kids who decide to work full time after graduating from high school.
How much it costs to go to college - almost $15,000 tuition and fees at our State University, my alma mater. A teen would have to work almost 48 hours a week for 52 weeks to earn a year’s tuition.
When I went to school, that could be earned in a summertime. Not to mention that, but I actually had real live associate and full professors teaching me. My lecture classes held 150 people, and *that* was considered huge. Nowadays, classes are taught by teaching assistants; professors that retire aren’t replaced. The salary is just split up to hire a lot of benefit-less grad students. Lecture classes have 500 people in them. Kids leave with $35,000 worth of debt, and no jobs.
It’s a different world than the one we went to college in.