James Meadows
Professor Goeller
Research in Disciplines: College!
October 19, 2015
Research Proposal
Working Title: Part-time during School Time
Topic:
I am going to discuss and compare the relationship between college students who work and their academic success. There are a lot of students who have to work in school for multiple reasons (i.e. to pay for school, extra money, bills), and I’ll be discussing how much working affects students in both their academic success and social life.
Research Question:
Is there a strong (if any) correlation between students who work and their academic, social and/or everyday college success? How does the working environment affect the students who work in their respective jobs during their college experience?
Theoretical Frame:
For this topic specifically, there will need to be a large amounts of data and additional research to back my thoughts. Finding out whether working part time has an additional large effect on current students, is very dependent on additional knowledge and statistical analysis to help the argument entirely. In the study, “Academic Performance of College Students: Influence of Time Spent Studying and Working,” by Sarath A. Nonis and Gail I, Hudson, research was developed to study the habits of how students used their time, including both studying and working. Students are becoming less and less prepared for when they go to college. Interestingly, once students get to college, they tend to spend fewer hours studying and more time working. Recognizing “nonability” variables like motivation and study time, the research exposed that the variables significantly interacted with the ability to interact academic performance. However, contrary to what most belief, the study showed that the amount of time studying or at work had no direct influence on academic performance. Yet, wouldn’t there be a greater effect on someone’s academic success if they worked significantly more hours than if they had worked significantly less? This topic is very interesting to me because my friends and I both work and this is a topic that we have discussed amongst ourselves. Talking to colleagues about their struggles in school makes me question; how much of our success (or failure) at college is dependent on our work and ourselves?
Research and Plan:
As I mentioned in the Theoretical Frame, I will use the study, “Academic Performance of College Students: Influence time Spent Studying and Working,” to help with statistical knowledge and facts about the actual correlation between working and studying. In addition, “The effects of doing part-time jobs on college student academic performance and social life in a Chinese society” by Wong et al., is a study that helps explain the relationship between work and the academic success and social life of students in Macau, China. In the study, they treat employment as both a homogeneous and a heterogeneous experience then compare the relative importance of various characteristics of student employment, which is used to predict academic success and social life.
I will also look at a couple of our required reading books. “Students are Already Workers,” and “How to Graduate from Starbucks,” by Marc Bousquet and Amanda Ripley respectively, provide insight from the students themselves about how much their job affects them and what kind of tolls and struggles each particular student faces. Direct insight on a person’s life, will give a good representation of how a person struggles with the handling both work and school. Also, both of these two articles talking about work related injuries and how that can affect a person’s everyday life and activities.
I will also be looking at two additional resources to help further examine the correlation between working and the college life and success. One online article, “Learning and Earning: Working in College,” by Jonathan M. Orszag et al., provides additional insight on the effects of working in college. So how much working affects the students both now and in the future, looking at grades and dropout rates respectively. Also, the article looks compares students who work part-time and those who work full-time and compares the relationship between the two.
Lastly, “Exploring the Impact of Work Experience on Part-Time Student’s Academic Success in Malaysian Polytechnics,” by Norhayati Ibrahim et al., uses six factors to measure “perceived influence” of work experiences: positive belief, negative belief, intrinsic motivation, learning orientation, deep learning approach, and surface learning approach. The findings in the article suggest that the success of the students could depend on the effectiveness of the classroom environment, teaching and learning strategies.
Bibliography
Bousquet, Marc. “Students Are Already Workers.” How the University Works: Higher Education in the Low-Wage Nation. New York: NYU Press, 2008. 125-156. Print.
Ibrahim, Norhayati. “Exploring the impact of Work Experience on Part-time Student’s Academic Success in Malaysian Polytechnics.” Career and Technical Education Research (2012): v37 57-74. Web
Nonis, Sarath A. Hudson, Gail I. “Academic Performance of College Students: Influence Time Spent Studying and Working.” Journal of Education for Business. (2006), Vol.81 issue 3, 51-159. Web.
Orszag, Jonathan et al. “Learning and Earning: Working in College.” http://www.brockport.edu/career01/upromise.htm (2001). Web
Ripley, Amanda. “How to Graduate from Starbucks.” The Atlantic (May 2015): 60-72. Print and web.
Wang et al. “The effects of doing Part-Time jobs on College Student Academic Performance in a Chinese Society.” Journal of Education and Work. (2010) 79-94. Web.
I think students are working jobs while in school at increasingly high rates, and I would be very interested in seeing historical statistics. Rebekah Nathan (My Freshman Year) compared her own time studies of students with those of Michael Moffatt (Coming of Age in New Jersey) from two decades earlier and found that the biggest difference was the many hours that students spent working at jobs, which they had not done in the past. I imagine that many more students work today than in the past and that the majority are working longer hours than before. This is driven in part by the rise in tuition that privatization has created. You should definitely look for statistics on that.
ReplyDeleteThe real question people should ask is, "How does working while in school compare to not having to work while in school?" Those students whose parents can afford to provide them full room and board in addition to full tuition support have many more hours they can devote to academics or to internships in their chosen career areas (rather than working part time jobs at places they will never work at for a career) than those students who must work while in school. No question. The real question, I suppose, is what do those students do with all of that extra time? And the answer might be "Party." Of course, as Armstong and Hamilton show, that is not necessarily a long term problem for them, as the time spent socializing and building strong social networks with similarly affluent fellow students might help their career prospects in the long run. And students on the professional or academic pathway rather than the party pathway can definitely put those extra hours of studying to very good use.
I would also be curious to know if students who have to work many hours while in school end up choosing easier majors or easier courses, along the lines of what Armstrong and Hamilton found to be the case with students who join sororities and need to devote more hours to socializing than they have for studying.
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