Labour Participation of Higher Education Students

Abstract

The aim of this article is to shed light on the determinants of the decision to participate in the labour force while studying, and of the intensity of this participation as measured by the wages earned by students. We show that students react to their future expected economic benefits associated with their chosen course of study. In this sense, our results confirm Le vy-Garboua's (Revue francË aise de Sociologie XVII: 53 ± 80, 1976) thesis of working as an adjustment variable for the variations in the expected rate of return of discipline. Our results indicate that the decision to work while studying and its intensity depend on students' socioeconomic status and material needs, as well as external financial resources. Altogether, our results suggest that the equity and internal efficiency implications of such a social bias in the labour force participation behaviour might not be too important, but that some public interventions might nevertheless improve the overall external efficiency by allowing students to spend more time on more valorizing activities rather than unskilled and low-paid jobs.

Disability and the Transition to Adulthood

“…The former group is largely composed of young people who cannot find a job due to a lack of high-school qualifications, little work experience or other factors (Caspi et al 1998;Ruiz-Quintanilla and Claes 1996). Students, on the other hand, often forgo full-time employment to engage in an important form of human capital investment that, for most people, is a necessary step on the path to financial independence (Demeulemeester and Rochat 2000). As demonstrated in the analysis, disability has distinct effects on membership in these different groups.…”

Social Inequalities in Student Employment and the Local Labour Market

“…This cross-sectional mail survey has been conducted every two or three years since 1983 and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF). When analysing general labour market participation, we use the waves: 2000/2004/2007, 2009/2010/2013(Bargel et al 2005Georg and Ramm, 2018). The two oldest survey waves containing specific questions on job quality (2000/2001 and 2003/2004) are used for testing our theoretical hypotheses about student job quality: all working students were asked if the job's content is related to their studies 4 .…”

“…Inequalities in terms of how social origins affect the quantity and quality of student employment have been widely documented in a wide range of industrialized, Western countries (Bozick 2007;Callender 2008;Canabal 1998;Demeulemeester and Rochat 2000;Metcalf 2003;Moreau and Leathwood 2006;Nienhüser 2001;Roksa et al 2009;Roksa and Velez 2010;Sanchez-Gelabert et al 2017;Weiss and Roksa 2016). In order to explain such differences in labour market participation we need to understand students' rationales for entering paid employment.…”

“…Several previous studies have explained students' employment as the result of a rational decision and assumed that students' choice of whether to work or not is dependent on their social origins (e.g. Callender 2008;Demeulemeester and Rochat 2000;Roksa et al 2009). From this perspective, social differentials in student employment patterns can be explained by greater financial need, making work a necessity among students from lower-class backgrounds.…”

“…Full models for Table 3: student labour market participation-the2000/2004 waves. (Source: Student Survey Konstanz, the 2000/2004 own calculations) …”