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With the cost of college tuition soaring, many students are working while they study. But does “working your way through college” pay off for a student, academically?

Hayden Kramer is considering a job once he starts in college, in several weeks time.

“If after the first semester I find that I have a lot of free time, I’m definitely going to look for a job,” he says.

His mother, Betty, has reservations.

“His first job is to get good grades, period,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want him to get a job and get some experience of working.”

The American Council on Education says most undergraduate students work while in college. A quarter of them work over 35 hours a week. But studies show any job that takes more than 20 hours a week can hurt a student’s grades.

“It eats up the day, it eats up the week and really, what I find, is it eats up the time that students have when they’re kind of awake, mentally, “ says Charles Gallagher, sociology professor at Georgia State University. “So they’re not there to sit down and to do the homework, to do the writing, to do the reading, to annotate in the books, properly.”

College student Trevor Mitchell is quitting his job at a pharmacy – because the time spent at work was affecting his grades.

“I was getting Bs in classes that I knew I could get As in,” says the 19-year-old. “And when you need that couple of extra hours to study, [but] you have to go to work, that’s the difference between a B and an A, basically.”

Experts say if your child is going to work, they should find a job related to their studies.

“It would be a great resume builder,” says Professor Gallagher, “and you also get a taste of do you really want to be an accountant, do you really want to be a lawyer, do you really want to be a cop? So you can find out if, in fact, the career path that you think you want to do is what you want to do.”

But the key, experts say, is making sure the workplace doesn’t compete with your child’s grades.

“Having a job, if it can be juggled, is good; is part of that educational process,” says Betty Kramer. [It] may not be for your degree, but its part of that growing-up process. So I would say that it’s very important, and not something to put off for four years, until you get out of college.”

What We Need To Know

• A good place your child to begin their job search is at their college’s student employment office. Many of those offices have lists of Federal Work Study (FWS) positions – as well as non-FSW jobs, both on- and off-campus. (University of Wisconsin System)




• If your child is a fulltime college student, try to limit their part-time work to 20 hours a week. According to research, on-campus jobs are usually the best way to control hours spent at work. (Central Missouri State University)




• Advise your child to take any part-time jobs seriously – and to work on developing skills. Their present job supervisor may also end up helping them to a future job. (Valdosta State University – Office of Career Services)

Resources

• American Council on Education

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