Community college leaders should pay attention to something that happened in the youth labor market this summer. After a quarter-century decline, summer employment of 16- to 19-year-olds ticked up to 35.5% from 33.8% last year, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of federal employment data.
The low point came in the summers of 2010 and 2011, when just 29.6% of teens worked for pay. This small gain leaves teen employment nowhere near the peak in 1978, when roughly 58% worked summers. After 25 years of nearly uninterrupted decline, even a small gain is worth noticing.
This suggests that the first rung of the career ladder is starting to get rebuilt, piece by piece, by families, young people, schools and employers acting on their own. The first rung is where everyday, low-stakes work experiences teach young people to show up, take direction and function inside an organization before the stakes get high.
This summer’s evidence, some encouraging and some unsettling, points to why community colleges have more to do with whether that rebuilding succeeds than almost any other institution in American education.
More pathways needed
Start with the unsettling part. A recent NPR investigation found that recent college graduates are struggling to land entry-level jobs, and many blame artificial intelligence. The evidence is mixed.
Stanford University researchers found a 16% decline in early-career employment in AI-exposed fields, like software development and marketing, since late 2022. They argue AI displaces the textbook knowledge that new graduates learn before they build the on-the-job judgment that comes with experience.
A Ramp Economics Lab study found the opposite. Companies making the heaviest AI investments grew entry-level headcount by 12% over two years. The researchers caution they can’t say AI caused the hiring gains because the heaviest AI spenders were already larger, faster-growing firms.
No one in that debate is arguing AI is standing still, only whether it’s currently narrowing the door to entry-level work or, for firms that use it well, widening it.
Community college leaders don’t need to resolve that debate before acting on it. Either way, the response is the same.
They need to build more structured, guided pathways between the classroom and paid work. This allows students to accumulate experience and employer relationships before competing for a shrinking supply of unstructured entry-level jobs. That’s ground community colleges already occupy.
A look at Ivy Tech
Indiana offers a useful case. This fall, the state is launching its first Indiana Career Apprenticeship Programs. These are multi-year, paid apprenticeships in banking, construction and advanced manufacturing, combining on-the-job training with classroom instruction. They count toward a college credential rather than substituting for one.
This complements a new mission for Ivy Tech Community College, which focuses on workforce development and more employer-paid programs. Indiana’s education secretary says the goal is to ensure skills a student builds through work-based training are carried forward into postsecondary credit instead of counting for nothing beyond the job.
That framing matters. It treats early work experience and college learning as cumulative, not competing. That’s the foundation the first rung needs if it’s going to hold weight again.
How Workforce Pell factors in
The second piece of this summer’s news is Workforce Pell, the new federal grant that extends Pell eligibility to short-term job-training programs. A Child Trends analysis of states’ early proposals for Workforce Pell-eligible early care and education programs illustrates both the opportunity and the governing gap.
States are starting to designate which occupations and programs qualify. But Workforce Pell comes with a genuinely difficult requirement. Tuition and fees for a short-term program can’t exceed the earnings boost a credential is expected to produce. That’s a sound guardrail against low-value credentials in theory.
In practice, it puts state agencies and colleges in the job of forecasting wage outcomes for programs that, in fields like early childhood education, sit on top of chronically low base pay. This means that some of the neediest workforce sectors risk being priced out of the grant meant to serve them, unless states pair Workforce Pell with parallel wage investments.
Community colleges are going to be the ones translating this federal framework into something real for students, which means they are also going to be the ones absorbing its rough edges. That is worth saying plainly, not as a complaint but as a planning fact.
Colleges implementing Workforce Pell-eligible short-term programs should expect to spend real effort on the earnings-data side of program approval, not just the curriculum side. They should look for partners willing to shore up the sectors where the math is hardest.
Real relationships
None of this works without the third ingredient that doesn’t show up in labor statistics. That’s relationships. I’ve come to think of this as social wealth, the stock of sponsors, mentors and institutional connections an individual can draw on to turn a single opportunity into something durable.
It works much the way financial wealth does. A family with savings can absorb a setback and still move forward. A young person with social wealth, like a relative who knows a hiring manager, a teacher who makes a call, a mentor who vouches for them, can absorb a stumble in the job market and still find a foothold.
Students without that social reserve don’t lack ambition or ability. They lack the network that turns an opening into an offer, and one offer into the next, what social scientists call social capital.
The wealth framing is more useful here. It makes clear that this is something students can accumulate over time, even unevenly. That’s the same way financial wealth accumulates. Institutions can either help build it or leave it to chance.
The Indiana apprenticeship story includes a small but telling detail. It profiles a National Guard veteran who found her way into a bank apprenticeship program and was, within months, promoted to help run it. That didn’t happen because she had the strongest resume in the applicant pool. It happened because the program put her inside an institution long enough for people there to notice her, sponsor her and move her to the next rung.
That’s social wealth being built in real time. It’s part of workforce policy, though the hardest to legislate and easiest to overlook.
Community colleges, more than almost any other institution, are positioned to help build those relationships deliberately, at scale, for students who don’t already have them. This happens through employer partnerships, apprenticeship intermediaries, and advising built around the moment a student takes their first paid position, not just their first credit hour.
Takeaways for leaders
The teen employment numbers, the AI-jobs debate and the Workforce Pell rollout are three separate stories in this week’s education press. Considered together, they describe one institution standing at their intersection.
Here’s what community college leaders should take from this discussion.
- Treat work-based learning as college credit’s front door, not its competitor. Indiana’s model is worth studying.
- Build Workforce Pell program proposals with real wage-outcome data from the start. Flag sectors, like early childhood education, where state wage investment should move in parallel.
- Expand structured, guided entry points to paid work, like apprenticeships, employer partnerships and internship pipelines. Don’t wait for the unstructured entry-level job market to recover on its own.
- Make relationship-building with employer sponsors, alumni networks and advising an explicit, funded part of the student experience. Treat it as social wealth the institution helps students build, not an informal byproduct of it.
The first rung didn’t disappear because young people stopped wanting to climb. It thinned out because the structures that once built it quietly eroded. Right now, families, schools, employers, and individuals are rebuilding it piece by piece, each acting on their own.
Community colleges are one of the few institutions positioned to do something different. They can turn that scattered effort into something deliberate. The apprenticeships, funding fights and relationship-building described above suggest some already are.
