“We know high school students face challenges when it comes to work and education,” Julie Murphy, Walmart’s executive vice president of people, said in a call with reporters. “We see this as a pipeline [of workers] that we can leverage."

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Retailers have been struggling to find and keep workers in an industry marked by low wages and high turnover. Walmart last year raised its starting wage to $11 an hour to keep up with rivals such as Amazon and Costco, which pay at least $15 an hour. The company also has started offering paid parental leave and adoption benefits to full-time employees. (Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)

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The U.S. unemployment rate of 3.6 percent is at its lowest level since 1969.

“When the labor market tightens, retail is one of the first industries to feel it,” said Hyunseob Kim, an assistant professor of labor economics at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, told The Post last month. “Retail workers tend to be generalists — what a Walmart worker does is similar to what a Macy’s worker does — so it’s easy for them to move from one employer to another.”

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The percentage of teenagers who work has fallen steadily in recent decades as schoolwork and extracurricular activities became more demanding. Roughly 34 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds have a job, down from 58 percent in 1979, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That figure is projected to drop to 26 percent by 2024.

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Even when teenagers want to work, economists say, it has become harder for them to find entry-level jobs because older Americans are staying in the workforce longer or are taking on part-time work to make ends meet.

At Walmart, executives said, high school students make up less than 2 percent of its U.S. workforce.

“We know that teenagers are having a hard time finding that first job,” Drew Holler, Walmart U.S. senior vice president of associate experience, said on a call with reporters. The retailer is hoping to “connect high school students with not just a job but with a career, potentially.”

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Last year, Walmart began offering associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in business and supply-chain management to its employees for $1 a day. About 7,500 employees are enrolled in the program, which covers the cost of tuition, books and fees at three universities.

Walmart is expanding that program to six schools with online programs for working adults. They include the University of Florida in Gainesville, Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, and Wilmington University in New Castle, Del.

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Rachel Carlson, chief executive of Guild Education, a Denver-based company that oversees the program, said it has saved Walmart workers “tens of millions” of dollars in student debt in the past year.

“Why go to college to get a job when you can get a job to then go to college?” she said.