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Keywords

high school, high school students, child labor, employment, teenagers

Abstract

Recent federal warnings about increases in child labor law violations coincide with various state efforts to dilute child labor protections. This Article confines itself to the array of outcomes attributable to lawful part time work performed by non-trafficked, full-time, U.S. high school students. This Article sets out to develop two modest and separate—though related—claims. The first claim is that clear and reliable answers do not emerge for such basic policy questions as, for example, whether student part-time work during high school constitutes a penalty or, instead, confers rewards to students. This Article’s second claim is methodological. Specifically, much of the existing research on the implications of part-time work on full-time students lacks a sufficiently developed and secure empirical footing. Data limitations as well as research design threats imposed by selection effects persistently emerge as meaningful challenges for much of the research in this area. Part I quickly and descriptively summarizes key longitudinal full-time high school student part-time employment trends. Part II engages with existing research on the effects of part-time work on various high school student outcomes and, in so doing, illustrates how a lack of a scholarly consensus on the most salient student outcome complicates—and obscures—potential policy implications from this research literature. Part III reviews the leading data sets in this policy space and illustrates how they fall short of supplying an adequate empirical footing necessary for helpful, reliable analyses of how part-time work intersects with an array of student outcomes. The conclusion emphasizes that what we do not yet know about the consequences of part-time work for full-time high school students, at least empirically, risks overwhelming what we do know.

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