Many teens struggled to find work this summer, but experts said that labor force participation among this group has been dropping for years. | Santiago Guzman/Missouri Business Alert
Amelia Donaldson, a 20-year-old Missourian, started looking for a job in early May with a clear goal – find work doing something in healthcare. As a junior working toward a bachelor's degree in health science, she wanted to build experience for her future career.
It didn't work out that way. “There are quite a few jobs here in Columbia, Missouri, but unfortunately, a lot of the jobs that I'm looking for are not something that will apply to my career,” she said.
Donaldson kept searching for about a month and a half. By mid-June, she stopped focusing only on healthcare and started applying for jobs in food service, security, Amazon warehouses, airports and other places. In total, she applied to around 42 jobs, but got only five interviews. Eventually, she started working as a cross-utilization agent at Columbia Regional Airport.
Donaldson is one of many young people who have struggled to get a job this summer.
Not everyone had the same difficulties finding employment. Claire Dunkin, 16, has worked for two summers as a Life Enrichment Assistant at a Columbia senior living facility. They got the job through Columbia's Career Awareness Related Experience program, which helps place teens with local employers and supports them during the hiring process.
Dunkin said CARE made finding a job easier for them, but they do not think most teens have that experience. Their friends were able to find jobs, but they "had to work really hard to get them.”
Chidima Oguchiku, 17, had a similar experience. She applied to work at Walmart but did not receive a response. Instead, Oguchiku relied on CARE to get a summer job.
She said her friends who applied outside of the CARE program often wait weeks to hear back from employers, if they receive a response at all.
“That can be hard for us, especially as kids, because we don't have patience,” Oguchiku said.
Data shows drop in teen workforce participation
The youth labor force – 16- to 24-year-olds working or actively looking for work – grows sharply between April and July each year. In 2026, this labor force grew by 2.1 million, or 9.8%, from April to 23.5 million in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The report also said 53.8% of workers in this age group were employed in July 2026, up slightly from 53.1% a year earlier, and unemployment for that group fell to 9.1% from 10.8% over the same period of time.
But, the outlook changes when looking at only teen employment. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas had projected in May that it would be the weakest summer for teen hiring since 1948. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that teen participation in the workforce has been declining across the country for a long period of time.
According to the FRED data, the labor-force participation rate for 16- to 19-year-olds was 37.3% in June 2024, and it had fallen to 35.1% by June 2025. This June, it went up slightly to 35.4%.
In a month-by-month comparison, the participation rate declined steadily in recent months – 35.8% in April, 35.7% in May, 35.4% in June and 34.9% in July. The most recent July participation rate is lower than July 2025, when the rate was 35%, and July 2024, when it was 36.4%.
The BLS report said the three largest employers of 16- to 24-year-olds in July 2026 were leisure and hospitality with 25% of employed youth, retail trade with 18% of employment, and education and health services with 14% of employment. Leisure and hospitality registered an employment decline of around 1.1% from a year earlier, while retail trade rose about 4.7% and education and health services were roughly flat.
Youth job programs see rising demand, waning funds
Job-placement programs across Missouri are seeing more demand while receiving less funding and dealing with an increased minimum wage in the state.
STL Youth Jobs is a St. Louis-based nonprofit that helps teen workers get jobs and raises private and public funding to pay them directly. They typically receive between 2,000 and 2,500 applications a year, and that number jumped by roughly 500 this year.
Hillary Frey, the executive director of the STL Youth Jobs, said it was “a pretty big jump” for them. She said the program funded about 400 jobs last summer, but with about the same amount of fundraising, it could support only 325 jobs this year.
The CARE program in Columbia also registered a sharp increase in applications this summer.
Ron Schmidt, the program’s supervisor, said, “This year we received 595 applications, and that is a record. Just four years ago, we had 250 applications, and so it's really gone up substantially since then.”
He said the program had received 506 applications in 2018 and 567 in 2019, but it hadn't come close to 500 again until this year.
“Maybe it's because other places are not hiring teenagers as much as they used to,” he said.
Ericka Schmeeckle, the assistant director for workforce development for the city of Springfield, said the state’s Jobs League program lost all of its funding this year. The program had helped teens get their first jobs by paying wage subsidies and covering costs such as gas cards, bus passes and childcare. Because of this funding loss, they could not offer any subsidized positions.
Experts point to declining employment trends
Alan Spell is an assistant extension professor researching regional economic development at University of Missouri Extension and a former lead researcher at the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center. Spell said the trend of declining teen employment began more than 20 years ago. Before the 2000s, about half of 16- to 19-year-olds had jobs. Nationally, that rate was around 36% in 2025, while Missouri teens were doing somewhat better, with participation closer to 46%.
Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said cost pressures are hurting the industries that usually hire teens.
“The dynamics that drove that slowdown – cost pressures, automation, employers waiting to see how consumer demand holds up – are all still in place, and in some cases, they've intensified,” he said in a statement accompanying the firm's summer job projection report.
Peter Mueser, a labor economist at the University of Missouri, said the national job market is unusual right now. “There are far fewer people being laid off and far fewer people being hired,” he said, adding that with less turnover overall, “there might be fewer jobs available for those coming onto the market the first time.”
He also said that application numbers should be compared carefully. Seasonal changes and any changes within individual programs should be considered before determining any clear reason for the increase.
Spell sees two trends happening consecutively.
“One is that we do see, especially this summer, a lower hiring environment of employers in general,” he said. “The other is that there's still plenty of jobs out there for the youth, but more are choosing career and technical training so they can enter the workforce more quickly after high school. This is good, as they’ll earn higher wages with these job skills, but it does reduce the supply of available entry-level workers.”
Both Spell and Mueser, however, said low summer employment rates among younger folks can have long-term effects.
“There's always a return... people who work on a job learn things on the job,” Mueser said. “If people are unable to find jobs and they're doing nothing, then that is going to be damaging to them in the long run.”