Working and academic performance at university

Does working negative impact on students' academic performance at university? It's an interesting and important question, especially as students are increasingly finding themselves in financial positions where working is a necessity in order to meet their living costs, rather than a source of 'beer money' as it was in earlier decades.

However, the theoretical relationship between working and academic performance is not straightforward. As Moris Triventi (European University Institute) outlines in this 2014 article published in the journal Economics of Education Review (ungated earlier version here), there are four possibilities for this relationship:

1. Zero-sum: Every hour spent working is one less hour that could be spent studying or attending classes, and since studying and attendance are important for academic performance, working has a negative causal impact on academic performance;
2. Reconciliation: Students are reasonably flexible in their allocation of time between working, studying, and leisure, so an additional hour spent studying does not necessarily reduce studying or attendance, and students can be strategic in choosing classes that are less demanding, so there is likely no effect of working on academic performance;
3. Negative selection: Students who choose to work during university are different in meaningful ways from students who do not work, perhaps because they did not achieve as well at high school, or they don't qualify for scholarships or other assistance, or because their aren't as motivated towards their studies, so working is negatively correlated with academic performance, but the relationship is not causal;
4. Positive selection: Students who choose to work during university are high achievers and highly motivated, and are able to work because they are confident that it will not negatively impact on their studies, so working is positively correlated with academic performance or there may be no effect, but if there is a positive relationship then it is not causal.

Triventi goes on to test these theories using representative survey data collected from 1834 Italian freshman students in 2004. First, he separates students into three groups (non-working students; low-intensity workers; and high-intensity workers), and notes that:

Among Italian freshmen in 2002–2003, 17% worked up to 20 h during their first academic year, while 10.5% worked on average more the 20 h per week... Low-intensity workers worked on average 11.3 h per week, while high-intensity workers worked 35.4 h.

Then, looking at the relationship between working and academic performance (measured by the number of credits earned in the first year of university), he finds that:

Looking at high-intensity work there are few doubts: in all models it has a large detrimental effect on academic progression, even when controlling for both observed and unobserved variables. This means that the zero-sum approach fully applies to the condition of high-intensity workers, who devoted on average 35 h per week to their job. It is likely that such a degree of involvement makes it difficult to devote a sufficient amount of hours to study, and thus to maintain a regular academic progression...

The second noteworthy finding refers to the low-intensity employment status. In this case, the results change in different models. Bivariate and traditional multivariate analyses show no major gap in academic progression between low-intensity workers and non-working students... once accounting for unobserved variables – which are likely to capture motivation and multitasking skills in our work – the picture changes, since the low-intensity employment status also negatively affects the number of credits acquired (albeit to a less extent compared to the high-intensity employment status). This means that, in line with the positive-selection hypothesis, the standard analyses in Italy mask the fact that low-intensity workers are positively selected (conditional on observed covariates) and thus are able to compensate the difficulties of being employed while studying by their higher commitment to pursue the two activities at the same time.

In other words, working does have a negative effect on academic performance. For students trying to study while working essentially full-time, the effect is negative and large (these students do much worse than non-working students). Students working part-time are able to compensate for the negative effects of working, but that is because of the types of students who decide to work part-time while studying.

The results of this study are interesting, and probably should worry us. As we increasingly move university teaching to more online and flexible modes, this opens up the possibility for more full-time workers to engage in studying, or for students who would otherwise be working a little or not at all, to work more. Both of those are likely to lead to a reduction in academic performance.

A university system that encourages students to take on paid work due to financial reasons is setting those students up to fail. To avoid this negative outcome, we really need a student allowances and loans system that is able to provide adequately for students' living costs (unlike what we have now).