High school students in part-time employment:

What effects on scholastic performance?

Educators in the United States have long argued about the effects of part-time work on the academic performance of high school students. Though many studies claim that there is a relationship between a student’s grade point average (GPA) – the standard measure academic performance in high schools and universities in the US – and the number of hours the students is employed, there seems little agreement on what that relationship is.

Several studies (Sneider, 1982; Wallace, 1988; Johnson and Payne, 1989) suggest that students who work after school do better in their school work than students who do not have a job. Peel and Maas …show more content…

Krunjic (1995) found that much the same results but that the improvement in GPA dropped off with even fewer hours per week. However, the decrease of students’ GPAs is not too serious for educators to worry.

First, I would like to mention two different opinions. Johnson and Payne suggest that students working after school have higher GPAs the students who do not have any job. In some situation, this conclusion may be true. In case students know how to manage their time to work out of school, they will have more opportunities to practice their knowledge and get more experiences than students who only study at schools. In contrast, for Peel and Maas, it is opposite that students focusing on studying only will get higher GPAs. They probably think that if students have to spend time working part-time jobs, they have less time to study. As the results, their performance at school probably is lower than those who do nothing but studying. I think with these two opposite conclusions; these educators all have their own arguments and evidences in their mind. However, I am not convinced at all because there is no example or statistic supporting their conclusions.

It can be seen that we cannot know exactly whether the effects that working part-time job bring to students are bad or not. It seems to be a problem which educators still have no consensus about the answers.