With the number of both summer jobs and internships expected to increase this summer and many students looking for work to bridge their finances or grow their professional skills, the personal-finance website WalletHub took an in-depth look at 2016’s Best Cities for Summer Jobs.
To help job seekers find the best short-term employment options, WalletHub’s analysts compared the 150 largest summer-job markets in the U.S. Our data set of 18 metrics ranges from “median income of part-time workers” to “availability of summer jobs” to “percentage of insured part-time workers.”
Top 20 Cities for Summer Jobs
1 Washington, DC 11 Irvine, CA
2 Scottsdale, AZ 12 Denver, CO
3 San Francisco, CA 13 Minneapolis, MN
4 Orlando, FL 14 Grand Rapids, MI
5 Reno, NV 15 Salt Lake City, UT
6 Cincinnati, OH 16 Atlanta, GA
7 Fort Lauderdale, FL 17 Plano, TX
8 St. Louis, MO 18 Seattle, WA
9 Boise, ID 19 Miami, FL
10 Pittsburgh, PA 20 Little Rock, AK
Chicago Ranks 97th for Summer Jobs, but 18th for Internships
Chicago ranked 97th overall – 87th for the Youth Job-Market Outlook key dimension and 130th for Social Environment & Affordability.
Surprised that my hometown just made it into the top 100, I asked WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez to explain. “Job opportunities for young people are harder to come by in Chicago,” she explained. “The city’s unemployment rate of the population aged 16 to 24 is almost 27 percent, ranking 127th out of the 150 cities analyzed. The number of available part-time jobs and temporary jobs are quite low, 22 per 1,000 residents and just 7 per 1,000 residents, respectively.”