Burning the candle at both ends: Exploring undergraduates’ perceptions of juggling work with study

Abstract

The present educational climate places students into a complex learning environment that offers little or no financial support, but instead has contributed to the ‘half-time’ student (Curtis, 2007). A student’s dependency on term-time employment has dramatically increased over the last decade (Callender, 2008) and is often attributed to the Government’s radical change in funding arrangements. The effect of managing both an employment and academic role is said to impact on a student’s academic performance (Carney et al., 2005) in addition to their social experiences within the Higher Education setting (Little, 2002). However, an overall opinion or consensus of how students perceive this situation is currently unknown, as their attitudes have largely been ignored.Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), this study draws upon data from qualitative semi-structured interviews to explore employed and unemployed undergraduates’ perceptions towards paid term-time employment and aims to consider the effect of this employment status on the overall higher education experience.The findings revealed an insight into the lives of four undergraduates, highlighting how their employment seemed to define and emphasise their role at university. From the analysis three super-ordinate themes emerged; Disengagement from University Experience, Ability to Detach from the ‘Student World’, and Social Class Divide. Although the themes are separately discussed, they are all intrinsically linked and represent a part of the whole experience felt by these students.The study concludes that student perceptions towards employment are, at times contradictory; highlighting that term-time employment imposes both negative and positive implications on them as students. Whilst working was often found to reduce commitment to their course and persistence at university because they were exposed to other life choices and opportunities; their employment also allowed these students to integrate and establish skills outside the academic environment. These findings imply that a student’s participation in university life is complex and their roles and expectations are largely controlled by their employment responsibilities, suggesting that their perceptions of university life are likely to be vastly different from the traditional student model seen prior to the 1990s with little or no time spent in paid employment.