Term-Time Employment and the Academic Performance of Undergraduates

Abstract

This article outlines a framework for evaluating the decision of undergraduate students to engage in term-time employment as a method of financing higher education. We then examine the impact of work on academic achievement and find that employment has modest negative effects on student grades, with a grade point average (GPA) falling by 0.007 points per work hour. We use a unique custom dataset based on students at a traditional regional state university that provides information on student motivations and allows us to directly address some of the endogeneity problems that affect existing literature. We find that students who work for primarily financial reasons earn lower grades than students who work for career-specific skills but higher grades than those students motivated by a desire for general work experience.