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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:

The teen summer job is an American tradition that has been in decline since the turn of the century. From the 1950s through the 1990s, between 50% and 60% of Americans aged 16 to 19 had summer jobs. That started to decline in 2000, and during the Great Recession, it plummeted to less than 30%. It has barely rebounded since then, hitting 36% in 2019 before dropping back to 31% during the pandemic. This year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the share of 16- to 19-year-olds working or looking for work at 35%.

The article notes one reason why:

One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job. Only 20% of Asians aged 16 to 19 have one, compared to 40% of whites and approximately 30% of blacks and Hispanics. For adults it is the opposite, with Asians having the highest labor force participation rate.

Why are Asians half as likely to have summer jobs as white teenagers? In part, because they are busy studying. Tiger Moms think working as a lifeguard will not help anyone get into college, but test prep or math camp will.

The college admissions arms race puts pressure on parents who might otherwise prefer to let their teens spend their summer lifeguarding. Moms and dads worried about the intense competition decide to make their teens spend their summers on something that will boost their test scores or burnish their resumes. It is a vicious circle.

This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that "industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor."

This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.

None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."

Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

Saying one thing, then saying another, does not actually tie these things to each other. There was an entire and recent court case at SCOTUS specifically about how Harvard does not select the makeup of its student body from mere academic records or test scores, and just like New York's carry permit rates post-Bruen, Harvard has been hard and heavy at defying SFFA.

Sending your kid to put eighteen hours a day into study over their summer vacation will not get them to Harvard. Pushing them to have a hundred very marketable extracurriculars, which is another part of the equation here and goes very overlooked by the Compass, also won't. I think you already know that.

John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

It's a little funny that only 'mathematics' is the only part of that list that overlaps with the modern College Prep Uber Allies approach, and it's becoming an increasingly smaller portion of the focus. That's both the problem, and the kinda damning fault of this sort of rant. There's fair arguments about the tradeoff between the 50% chance of success at a mid-tier college and Mike Roweism, or about tradeoffs between education and work experience (so long as you don't flinch when anyone mentions what post-grad degrees do to total lifetime income). There are some less fair arguments where we compare college grads to non-college graduates and mumble whenever everyone mentions external variables, but are still worth knowing about.

Turning the debate into An Ivy League graduation specifically versus flipping burgers for a summer isn't just putting a thumb on the scales, it's throwing out any pretense of balanced evaluation.

This is only partially true. Excepting some URM (who are usually still in the 98th+ percentile for their demographic and so usually still would have studied very hard) and some athletes (who again are usually still 95th percentile plus academically), almost everyone who gets into Harvard in 2025 did work to tiger-mom levels. Sure, a few mega-donors’ kids with parents on the board of trustees make it in (although you’d be surprised at how many of them work very hard too), and there might be a handful of geniuses who get to international math olympiad champion status and perfect SAT and GPA without ever trying who make it too, but they’re in the small minority.

I knew plenty of people at elite colleges who didn't do anything near tiger mom workloads in high school. There are some seats open for ultra-grinders, but really not all that many (and you have to compete with Asians). Contrary to some stereotypes, admissions officers at top schools are looking for a mix of types, and being a tiger child grinder is boxing yourself into one of the most competitive. I don't know your educational history, but I'd imagine those types are overrepresented in the finance/consulting rat race, which may give you that impression, though. Much more common archetypes:

  • von Hammerstein-Equord's "smart but lazy" type, running off natural firepower and intellectual charisma, very good at playing the system to get better results for themselves than the grinders.
  • The ultra-passionate about a particular topic, who don't grind for it tiger mom style but are thinking about their subject all the time and treat it as a hobby as well as work (this represented most math majors I knew, and 100% of those who stayed math majors)
  • The "underrepresented major" type, think arch and anth at Oxbridge (iirc) or music at MIT (I'm guessing), who was essentially recruited to fill out a less-desired department. You can get into the best colleges in the world while being an absolute fuck-up that way, and the most elite private schools will steer their fuck-ups in that direction.
  • The "little grad student" type, who is not necessarily a crazy grinder (could be a variation of any of these archetypes) but has internalized the lingo and style of academics in such a way as to present as advanced on the academic track.

If you've got a kid with the requisite IQ, I'd maintain that the best way to get them into an elite college is not to grind them as hard as possible at the same metrics everybody else is trying to fulfil, but to let them freely explore their own academic and other high-status interests and put the work into them (i.e. basically anything a smart kid wants to do except vidya and scrolling). That's what gets you the kind of intellectual individuality that stands out to admissions officers. If they haven't got the requisite IQ, start thinking about what weird major they can take, or send them to State.

The "underrepresented major" type, think arch and anth at Oxbridge (iirc) or music at MIT

This doesn't work in the Ivy league, where you are admitted without committing to your major. It is a big deal at Oxbridge, probably the last surviving rich-kid backdoor.

It absolutely does work if you can convince the admissions officers that you are dead set on that particular department, you just have to be a little cannier. Knew a guy who was excluded (i.e. not formally expelled) from his posh high school for drug dealing who got into an Ivy-tier college that way.