Sasha Obama isn’t spending the last summer of her father Barack Obama’s presidency cooped up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: the 15-year-old is padding her resume with a summer jobworking the takeout window at Nancy’s, a seafood restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard, according to the Boston Herald. (And of course, the Secret Service is there in full-force.)
The First Daughter is lucky: According to a 2015 Pew report, the number of 16-to-19 year-olds who hold summer jobs has been on the decline for almost three decades. As MONEY has reported, while more than 50% of teens had summer jobs in the 1970s and 1980s, less than one-third do now. This year alone, there was a 14% decrease in the number of teens with a summer gig from 2015.
The Pew report pinned the decline on the decreasing number of entry-level jobs available, as well as the pressure on high school students to fill their college application with internships (ask older sister Malia, who had an internship with the TV show Girls before she was accepted to Harvard University), volunteer work, or sports and other non-paid activities.
Not to mention, a summer job is no longer a viable way to pay for college, which teens in the ’70s and ’80s could rely on: As Money, reported “the number of work hours it takes to pay for college has more than doubled,” which could make them even less attractive to the youths.
Luckily for the 15-year-old, her family is reportedly friends with the owner of Nancy’s, Joe Moujabber, which is how she got the gig, per the Herald. It really is all about who you know.
Image Credit: Reuters