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Notes -
Your point about the "sex recession" being mostly driven by decreased sex among black people is an interesting one. However, black people are only 13% of the population. I would have to crunch the numbers to be exactly sure how much the decline is attribute to each ethnic group, but my default assumption is that US population trends can be safely substituted for white population trends as whites are still approximately 60% of the population (and a lot of the other 40% of the population are Hispanics who don't deviate that strongly from whites in their behavioral indicators).
I don't think social class data would be as interesting as one would think. For one, we can't measure social class directly, but only proxy it by income. There is a strong correlation between income and social class, but not a perfect one: this would cause attentuation.
Also, looking at data like SAT scores by parental income made me realize that there is a large difference between say the 90th percentile income and the 99.9th percentile. Basically, there is a small percentage of people who are upper class such that I worry that wouldn't be enough sample size to say anything interesting about them.
Also, because of (a) social media (b) the top-down nature of educational policy, I'm not sure that there are large differences in the school experience and media environment of teenagers across different socioeconomic backgrounds. Indeed, the decreasing gap between blacks and whites in risky sexual behavior constitutes strong evidence that there is an increasing homogenization of teenage life: everyone goes to school, goes straight home to Snapchat and play Fortnite with their friends. As virtually all households, regardless of wealth, have smartphones, gaming consoles, and WiFi, the social experience of teenagers is in the broad strokes the same across different income brackets. A big difference between different income brackets is I suspect the prevalence of extracurricular activities: lacrosse practice, piano lessons, starting a non-profit foundation, etc. But I don't think any of these activities have an impact a student's sexual life.
I agree that some proportion of the male-female reported sex gap is that men tend to include "third base" (non-penetrative "sex") as sexual partners while women tend not to. If I had to make up numbers, it would that the gap is 50% attributable to differing definitions of sex, 50% attributable to lying (I'm agnostic about which sex is lying more often. If I had to guess, it would be men though).
I agree that the current extracurricular rat race is both a waste of time and detrimental to the healthy development of teenagers. I don't think you're proposed solution would work, however. I could try and outline a detailed critique, but it comes down to the fact that colleges neither have the institutional resources nor the incentive to audit employment claims closely. So by default, I would expect any employment requirement to be gamed and manipulated by upper class parents just as masterfully as they've manipulated the extracurricular pageant show.
A more feasible solution would be to (a) make college admittance solely be based on grades and test scores and (b) make it a lottery for the top X%. This would reduce incentives to compete endlessly to perfect your profile, but would create problems in that there would be no way for a one in a million student to distinguish themselves. This runs the risk that an alternative signalling ecosystem would emerge to replace the function that college currently performs.
Also, I think even with all of these changes, you wouldn't see the return of part-time jobs. It's not just that the opportunity cost of having a job is higher now, but the actual benefit (disposable income) isn't all the beneficial. Disposable income is useful so that you can buy a car and have money to spend at the mall. But if all your friends are at home playing video games, what's the point?
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