I've written a number of posts on the impact on students of working while studying (most recently here). The literature is much broader than I have the capacity to review on the blog. Fortunately, I don't have to do the donkey work there. This 2019 article by Brecht Neyt and Eddy Omey (both Ghent University), Dieter Verhaest (KU Leuven), and Stijn Baert (Ghent University), published in the Journal of Economic Surveys (ungated earlier version here) reviewed the literature up to that point.
In fact, Neyt et al. do such a thorough job, they look at the literature on the effects of working for both secondary school students and tertiary students. They first outline the theory:
On the one hand, according to Human Capital Theory (Becker, 1964), student employment can be a complement to education due to the additional skills and knowledge obtained while working. There are several reasons why student work may lead to such an increase in human capital. First, student employment enables the acquisition of new general and transferable skills such as work values, communication skills and a sense of time management... Second, combining study and work may offer students the opportunity to apply in practice what they have learned in school... Third, student employment may change students’ intertemporal preferences and increase their future-orientedness, thereby motivating them to work harder in school in order to achieve a certain career goal...
On the other hand, building on the Theory of the Allocation of Time (Becker, 1965), Zero-Sum Theory suggests that student employment and education are substitutes. More formally, this theory states that students have fixed time resources and that student employment strongly constrains students’ use of these resources. As a consequence, time resources used to work cannot be used for activities that enhance academic performance (e.g. studying, doing homework and attending classes... As the reduced time spent on these activities subsequently worsens academic performance... student employment may have a detrimental effect on educational outcomes.
It appears that the great Gary Becker has a bob each way on whether working affects student outcomes. Anyway, those are essentially the theoretical positions that I already outlined in this recent post. Neyt et al. also outline an additional theory from sociology:
Another theory that supports a negative association between student work and educational success is Primary Orientation Theory... often cited in the field of sociology. This theory suggests that the worse academic performance of working students compared to non-working students is related to their primary orientation being toward work rather than toward school. In other words, it reflects a disengagement from school that existed before the decision to work was made, rather than a negative effect due to student employment itself.
Having outlined the theory, Neyt et al. then discuss the problems with trying to find an effect, free of selection bias and endogeneity. As they note, much of the literature is based on correlations, rather than causal estimates. In fact, of the 50 studies they include in their review, they only consider nine to be sufficiently convincing. The results overall suggest negative impacts of working:
Of these nine studies we perceive as most convincing, three (i.e. 33.33%) find evidence of a negative effect of student employment on educational outcomes, although one study reports the effect is rather small. Additionally, four (i.e. 44.44%) report both negative and neutral effects, depending on the type of educational outcome (infra, Subsection 4.3.3), type of student job... or type of student... considered. Finally, two studies report neutral effects.
Note that none of those studies are reporting overall positive effects of working on students. Overall, it appears that Zero Sum Theory might be the best characterisation of the effect of student work on student outcomes. However, as Neyt et al. note, there are differences, particularly:
This pattern of a more negative effect for students in tertiary education is also found when only considering the most convincing studies... Indeed, the two more ambitious studies that find neutral effects of student work examined student work in secondary education. In contrast, the convincing studies in tertiary education always find at least some negative relationship.
That finding might be a bit surprising, given that tertiary education students have a bit more flexibility in their schedules. On that point, Neyt et al. write that:
We believe, however, that this finding is sensible for two reasons. First, due to the more challenging nature of studies at college or university (compared to those in secondary school), combining study and work during tertiary education may be less feasible. Second, combining study and work in tertiary education may change students’ attitudes toward school and intertemporal preferences. This may cause their present discounted value of continuing school to decrease and, as a consequence, the probability to quit tertiary education earlier than they anticipated before experiencing the student work to increase... This reasoning is less valid for students in secondary education, as they are to a lesser extent confronted with choosing between continuing school and joining the labour market.
There are some complex interactions between student engagement, student performance, and preferences for work or study at play. Tertiary students are less constrained than secondary students in terms of how they enact their preferences for attendance at the least, which may be why the impacts are more negative for tertiary students. This may also relate to the Primary Orientation Theory that Neyt et al. refer to earlier in their article.
So, the takeaway from this review is that student work is mostly negative. However, not always negative. As I noted in this post, working in the same subject area in which the student is studying may have positive medium-term benefits. These results are important, and students should take note. Policymakers should also take note. We should be supporting students better, so that they don't have to compromise their studying and future economic outcomes by working.
Read more:
No comments:
Post a Comment