The mainstream press has reported about how difficult it is for high school students to find summer jobs (for examples see here, here, and here), which makes this article seem counter-intuitive. It seems that the Net Gen doesn’t want to be a lifeguard. At the risk of starting a sentence “when I was a boy”, lifeguarding used to be a prestige summer job for high school students.

There are shortages of qualified American students and even the visa students from Eastern Europe  that used to take a lot of these jobs are less willing to come over because of the declining value of the U.S. dollar.

Why are the Net Gen less interested in lifeguard jobs? From the article:

As the swimming season opened over Memorial Day weekend, area pool managers were facing the most severe lifeguard-supply shortage in memory—perhaps the worst ever, says Amy Kroloff of Century Pools.

“This is definitely the most challenging year I’ve ever seen,” says Kroloff, whose Kensington-based employer manages hundreds of community, apartment, and condo pools on the East Coast and is the biggest such manager in the D.C. market. “I’ve heard it was hard in the 1980s, but I wasn’t around for that. We thought we had the problems figured out.”

At some point during that last drought, Century and other large-scale pool management firms figured out they could no longer depend simply on American butts to fill the lifeguard chairs. Kids here started deciding jobs at the mall were better than those at the pool. And summer school went from a place reserved for unmotivated dirtballs taking remedial English to a hangout for responsible youngsters—good lifeguard stock—looking for college prep.

And, pool folks had to admit, lifeguarding had attained a rather shlocky stigma.

“Baywatch didn’t help us, I’ll tell you that,” says Hank Lavery, a pools lifer.