As you walk into a department store with your head held high, you feel confident and good about yourself.  You ask to speak to the manager about any job openings and quickly find yourself filling out an application.  As the manager reads over your information you hear the inevitable question, “Do you have work experience?”

            You were scared of this from the start.

            You have no experience and you walk out feeling down, wondering in the back of your mind if they will call back. The week passes, the call never comes, and you end up where you began: jobless.

            For teenagers these days finding a job has become more challenging as the unemployment rate has increased to 25.5 percent, its highest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track in 1948.

            The recession didn’t just hit our parents but us as well, and even harder.

            High school students are having a hard time finding employment because half of college graduates under the age of 25 are in jobs that don’t require a college degree (www.nytimes.com). They are working at places like Starbucks and the Gap, which were jobs once held mostly by high school students. 

            In addition, older workers are being forced to keep working because of weak retirement funds, thus tying up jobs for longer periods of time instead of freeing up employment for the younger generations.  This trickle down effect of employment has hurt high school students the most as their unemployment rate is nearly three times that of the non teenage population (9 percent) and nearly four times that of workers over 55 (6.8 percent).