Student employment and academic performance: an empirical exploration of the primary orientation theory

ABSTRACT

This study empirically assesses the thesis that student employment only hurts academic performance for students with a primary orientation towards work (versus school). To this end, we analyse unique data on tertiary education students’ intensity of and motivation for student employment by means of a state-of-the art moderation model. We find, indeed, only a negative association between hours of student work and the percentage of courses passed for work-oriented students. This finding may explain the contradictory results in the literature neglecting this factor.

KEYWORDS:

• Student employment
• academic performance
• primary orientation
• moderation analysis

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• I23
• J22

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ For information on the Flemish education system, we refer to De Ro (2008) and Baert and Cockx (2013). In a nutshell, the Flemish tertiary education system is accessible for all students with a secondary school diploma, without any entry exam (except for students who want to study medicines). 7 universities and 22 colleges are spread over less than 15,000 km² resulting in a high regional diffusion of providers of tertiary education. Tuition fees are comparatively low (and financial aid is provided to students from low-income households). The system is flexible in terms of the pace at which students accumulate credits.

² So, student jobs during the summer holidays were not considered as student employment.

³ An overview of these items can be found in Table A1 in the Appendix.

⁴ 4 items had to be reverse scored first.

⁵ Combining these 9 items to obtain a single indicator for primary orientation was permitted, as Cronbach’s α, indicating these 9 items’ internal consistency, was sufficiently high (α = 0.820).

⁶ Analyses based on the second performance indicator yielded very similar results and are available on request.

⁷ The fact that about two-thirds of the surveyed university students had a student job corroborates with the statistics provided in Baert et al. (2016).

⁸ Consequently, we only contribute to the literature focussing on the intensive margin of labour supply as a student worker (i.e. number of hours conditional on working at least 1 hour) and not to the literature focussing on the extensive margin (i.e. whether or not to work); The resulting sample size is rather small compared with the sample sizes presented in the former contributions to this literature in economics. However, it is comparable with the sample size in many moderation analyses presented in peer-reviewed literature in general (Hayes 2013). Moreover, as shown in Section III, it is sufficient to identify a significant moderation effect. Thereby, we argue that this sample size is sufficient to satisfy the exploratory aim of this research.

⁹ This is common practice in moderation analyses (Hayes 2013).

¹⁰ Note that the 3 categories of students we distinguish from here on do not correspond to the 2 distinguished in Table 1.