They’re Trading Higher Education for High Tech--but at What Cost?

Like many young, computer-savvy college graduates, Timothy C. Brown never worries about finding work. He gets flooded by offers, and recently started a $30,000-a-year job as a systems engineer for an Internet services firm in Atlanta.

But in this case, there’s a catch: Brown never went to college, and he’s only 18 years old.

Brown is part of an emerging teenage presence on the payrolls of many employers, particularly at budding entrepreneurial firms in multimedia, video game, computer and Internet-related fields.

The teenage computer whizzes, often prized for their creativity and up-to-the-minute skills, are accepting full- and part-time jobs doing everything from testing products to designing Web sites. Their pay is generally about $10 an hour, but it can go far higher if they possess exceptional talent.

“It’s a lot better than what they’d make at Starbucks,” said Paul McGlothlin, coordinator of Palisades Charter High School’s 1-year-old New Media Entertainment Academy, some of whose students have snared part-time jobs in multimedia and related fields. One of McGlothlin’s star pupils last year was offered a full-time computer-networking job for $60,000 a year, but turned it down to attend college.

Young prodigies are nothing new in high technology. No less than Bill Gates, the billionaire chairman of Microsoft Corp., quit Harvard in his junior year to launch what ultimately became his corporate juggernaut.

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But John A. Challenger, a watcher of workplace trends and executive vice president for the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., predicts that the hiring of teens for technology-related jobs will heat up in the next year. The trend is driven by a tight labor market for workers with computer skills and by the passion and feel for new technologies that some teenagers bring to the field. “Some of the people who understand the technology best are in their teens,” he said.

At the same time, Challenger said, “we’ve poured technology into every organization, and there are not enough people to handle it. . . . The whole technology field is sucking people out of other areas.”

Economists aren’t sure how many of the 4 million Americans employed in electronics-related manufacturing and service jobs are teenagers, but some note that the apparent move toward young hires reflects a turnabout in the job market: Back in the 1980s and the early 1990s, there were concerns that too many Generation X college graduates were taking jobs that were considered more suitable for high schoolers.

Now, at least in some limited high-tech fields, it appears that high school students and recent graduates are landing jobs that once required a college education.

Still, some observers worry about what will happen to youths who pass up college to take jobs in technology right out of high school. Challenger frets that these youngsters could burn out at an early age. “By making it lucrative for kids to come out of high school and get right into work, we don’t give them time to develop and prepare,” he said.

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McGlothlin shares those concerns. He also fears high school graduates might skip college for jobs that could quickly become obsolete by the introduction of more sophisticated software. On the other hand, on-the-job experience with computers can open teenagers’ eyes to new career opportunities.

Cara Naiditch, a 17-year-old senior at Palo Alto High School, said she was bored by the $5-an-hour restaurant job she had last year. Now Naiditch is earning twice that much maintaining an internal company Web page for a Palo Alto software firm, Oceania Inc., and she is considering a future in the computer field. “I didn’t think I wanted to do something with the Web until I started learning about it with this job,” she said.

Brown, who left high school two years ago at age 16 and earned his degree through an equivalency exam, doesn’t see college in his future. In the working world, he said, “I’m always at the apex of the technology curve or one step ahead of it.” In a college classroom, Brown said, he probably would be working on older technology.

Along with holding a job, Brown is the founder of an industry trade group known as the Internet Service Providers’ Consortium. Through his involvement in the group, which now boasts membership of more than 130 firms, Brown met his new boss, Charles T. Smith Jr., president of StarNet Inc.

“It’s safe to say that Tim is an exceptional individual and not the average 18-year-old off the street,” Smith said.

But Brown isn’t the only teen Smith has come across who is capable of holding an adult technology job, he said.

Teenagers “have no fear of the technology,” Smith said. “They’ve grown up with computers. They’re not fixed with a certain way of doing things or with certain tools. They’re willing to try new things.”

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Times staff writer Stuart Silverstein can be reached by phone at (213) 237-7887 or by e-mail at stuart.silverstein@latimes.com