Student Employment and Later Labour Market Success: No Evidence for Higher Employment Chances

Abstract

Summary We investigate the impact of student work experience on later hiring chances. To completely rule out potential endogeneity, we present a field experiment in which various forms of student work experience are randomly disclosed by more than 1000 fictitious graduates applying for jobs in Belgium. Theoretical mechanisms are investigated by estimating heterogeneous treatment effects by the relevance and timing of revealed student work experience. We find that neither form of student work experience enhances initial recruitment decisions. For a number of candidate subgroups (by education level and occupation type), even an adverse effect is found.

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

“…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).…”

Does Student Work Really Affect Educational Outcomes? A Review of the Literature

“…The importance of this problem originates from the fact that results can only be given a causal interpretation if endogeneity has been adequately controlled for (Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner, ; Marsh and Kleitman, ; Baert et al. , ). We describe the cause of the endogeneity of student work and later educational outcomes in Subsection 3.1.…”

“…The contributions listed in Table using ordinary least squares (OLS), linear probability models (LPM) and logit regression models are, from a methodological point of view, close to these first‐generation studies as their primary strategy is to absorb as much observable heterogeneity influencing both student work decisions and later educational outcomes as possible (Baert et al. , ). However, some pre‐existing differences between working and non‐working students are unobservable in survey and administrative data and, as a consequence, cannot be controlled for in these regressions.…”

“…One important reason why many students combine study and work is that it provides them with an income, which may help them to satisfy their consumption aspirations (Watts and Pickering, ; Baert et al. , ). However, research in multiple disciplines has shown that the effect of students’ work decisions may go beyond the short term.…”

Does it pay to care? Volunteering and employment opportunities

“…To measure the volunteering premium in employment opportunities, we built on the correspondence experimentation framework of Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004), which has been recently used and calibrated by Kroft et al (2013), Eriksson and Rooth (2014), Patacchini et al (2015) and Baert et al (2016c), among others. Within this type of experiment, pairs of fictitious job applications are sent to real job openings.…”