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One recent afternoon, Sita Adhikari disappeared into small room bustling with nurses on the fifth floor of Jefferson Hospital. Her shift drawing to a close, she emerged with a cart of plastic cups and moved briskly down the cardiac care unit full of thirsty, bedridden patients.
An 18-year-old Baldwin High School student, Ms. Adhikari came to the U.S. from Nepal five years ago as a refugee. But for all the instability she has experienced, she has her future mapped out: She wants to go to college to be a nurse.
This month, the rising senior finishes a six-week stint at the medical center in Jefferson Hills, where she has helped care for patients, assisted nurses and organized medical supplies. She joined 2,000 young people in Allegheny County in working six-week summer jobs at more than 300 work sites.
The placements are part of a growing effort by Partner4Work, the Pittsburgh region’s workforce development agency, to introduce young people — particularly those at risk of becoming disconnected from the workforce — to the responsibilities, demands and rewards of holding a job. Most participants earn Pennsylvania minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, meaning they take home more than $1,000 by the end of the program.
“It’s really important that young people can see themselves in a variety of careers,” said Laura Saulle, a Partner4Work official who leads the summer youth employment program, called Learn & Earn.
“Until they go out and start working for the first time, it doesn’t really hit them what a job can be,” she said.
Hard-to-reach careers
Nationally, the average employment rate for people aged 16 to 19 was about 32 percent last summer, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s down from 42 percent in 2005, from 53 percent in 1995 and from 58 percent in 1978, when the share of teens who held a summer job peaked, according to the agency.
One reason for the decline is that jobs once taken by teenagers — ice cream shops, fast food, entry-level retail positions — are filled by adults who need the hours to make ends meet.
“The problem is not a lack of desire by young people to have jobs in the summer; the problem is a lack of jobs,” said Thomas Showalter, director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Youth Employment Coalition.
Since the Great Recession, local governments have grappled with ways to bring young people job opportunities outside of school. And employers, even as the economy improves, remain vexed over how to tap into a workforce that remains too discouraged to put in resumes.
Among adults, labor force participation has fallen to about 63 percent, the lowest level since 1978. At the same time, national unemployment — those who are looking for work but can’t find it — sits near historic lows at 4.3 percent.
With a shared interest, cities and employers have dug deep to expand youth employment programs.
Hard-to-reach workers
Learn & Earn is still young. This is Partner4Work’s third summer administering the program, after several years of the city and county governments overseeing a patchwork of community groups that did the work largely on their own.
To reach students, the agency works through Pittsburgh Public Schools and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Managing the program means processing applications and working with more than two dozen community groups to determine job placements, Ms. Saulle said. They start in June and work through July.
Partner4Work’s survey of last summer’s Learn & Earn program provides a picture of the average participant: The students came from a household size of about 4 people with a typical income of $15,530. More than four in five participants were black; 6 percent were white. About three in five said they are enrolled in food stamps.
A 2015 study from the Pew Research Center found that while summer jobs have fallen for all teenagers, they remain particularly out of reach for minorities. The summer employment rate for 16 to 19-year-old whites was 34 percent compared with 19 percent for blacks, 23 percent for Asians and 25 percent for Hispanics, the study reported.
While there’s little data on summer jobs for immigrants and refugees, cultural barriers keep them from the American workforce, said Sarah C. Welch, director of the Career Development Center the Jewish Family & Children’s Services.
“They don’t know how to navigate the workforce,” said Ms. Welch, whose Squirrel Hill group placed 39 Learn & Earn students this summer. “They don’t have aspiration toward college because they don’t really look at it as an option for them.”
Searching for a better model
An even tougher sell is getting employers to pay for it. In many programs, most or all of the wages for the students are subsidized by the workforce agency, said Martha Ross, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
In Pittsburgh, participants are paid by Partner4Work or the community group that sponsors them, while the employer gets help for free.
Partner4Work spends $4.5 million each summer on Learn & Earn, with 87 percent coming from the federal government, according to numbers provided by Ms. Saulle. Foundations kicked in $550,000, while corporate sponsorships totaled $50,000 — just 1 percent of the program’s budget.
For the cities that have gotten private dollars, there can be a trade-off.
Nashville’s workforce program boasts more than 10,000 career opportunities for young people this summer. Ellen Zinkiewicz, youth services director for the city, said the majority of those offerings come from the private sector promising to directly hire people ages 14 to 24 years old. (Roughly 1,000 job opportunities are working short-term summer jobs or internships, she said.)
“The goal is not to create government jobs for 10,000 young people,” she said. “The goal is to create a city that has a culture of hiring young people.”
In exchange, Nashville cedes control over the hiring process.
It’s a tricky balance. Ms. Ross said while expanding access is important, summer youth programs risk putting too heavy an emphasis on number of participants over the right placement fit.
“It doesn’t answer the question: Have you made a difference in this young person’s life?” said Ms. Ross, who co-authored a widely cited study last year on how cities craft summer youth employment programs.
For some in Pittsburgh, the effect of a first job is evident.
One July morning at Partner4Work’s headquarters Downtown, a couple dozen older participants — ages 20 and 21 — gathered to talk about managing finances, an educational component offered by Learn & Earn. Many of them had returned after previous summers.
Chris Beckley, a 20-year-old journalism student at Clarion University, went through the program last summer and worked at the University of Pittsburgh to help the school gather data on Learn & Earn.
Mr. Beckley has worked multiple jobs to help pay his way through school, but his independent streak stems from his first paycheck from Steak & Shake when he was 16.
“I mean, honestly, I’ll never forget it,” the Penn Hills native said. “I went to buy a video game, and I’ll never forget the feeling it left being able to do something for my own. Not having to ask my mom, ‘Can I do this?’ I get money now so, I can do it on my own.”
Daniel Moore: dmoore@post-gazette.com, 412-263-2743 and Twitter @PGdanielmoore.
First Published: August 13, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
