Student employment in France: Hindrance rather than help for higher educational success?

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examine how student employment impacts higher educational trajectories in France. Focussing on undergraduates’ educational outcomes, we show the consequences of different intensities and levels of recurrence of student employment on perseverance in higher education. We use data from a nationally representative four-year longitudinal survey, descriptive analysis and logistic regression are performed to control for student characteristics. Our results suggest that student employment, especially when intensive and during periods of exams, increases exam failure. When it is recurrent over time, student employment often leads to university dropout. Furthermore, even for those who do manage to reconcile work and study, it lengthens the time spent in higher education. This consequence is particularly costly in France, where success in higher education is often judged by time-to-completion, encouraging strategies that lead to finishing degree requirements as quickly as possible. This approach is difficult to follow for students who must combine work and study, leading to particularly pronounced costs.

KEYWORDS:

• Student employment
• academic outcomes
• student dropout
• part-time employment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This additional survey was funded by the French Observatory of Student Life and subcontracted to a French research institute.

2. In France, although the majority of students enrolled in the first years of degree courses hope to earn a masters’ degree (M 2) qualification, some may opt to take a vocational degree in their third year and stop at that point or to prepare competitive examinations for civil service jobs.

3. The success rate does not include students having stopped their studies before the beginning of each year. A longitudinal approach will be adopted in next subsection.

4. Numbers were higher than in the previous surveys (10% in April 2014 and 16% in April 2015), which can be explained by some of the sample having completed their education between 2015 and 2016.

5. A more subjective question was put at the end of the survey to all students about means, which in their view best reconciled paid work and studies. Some 52% of all students think distance teaching would be a good way to help students in employment, but this is the case of 75% of students in recurrent employment and more than 60% of those having discontinued education.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Béduwé

Catherine Beduwe is a Researcher at Toulouse School of Management Research (UMR CNRS 5303, Université Toulouse Capitole). Her research activities highlight the training and employment relationship, and more particularly youth transitions into the labour market.

Jean François Giret

Jean-François Giret, PhD, is a Full Professor of Education at the University of Burgundy, as well as the Director of the Institute for Research in the Sociology and Economics of Education (IREDU). His research interests include higher education pathways, student employment, transition from school to work, skill mismatch.