Effect of Jobs on Academic Performance

Group 8

Genesis Payan, Amir Doost, Latina Vergara

Professor Lewallen

April 23, 2018

 Introduction

As many know college is not cheap nor is living on one's own. In order to create a

sustainable life as a young adult, many students will opt to secure a part time job in order to be

able to feed oneself and live a life outside of school. With this being said, we wanted to observe

the effects of jobs on academic performance. In order to collect all of these answers we used

Google Docs Form, across several classes we collected 130 responses total. In order to achieve

an idea of the demographic that were answering we asked for gender, whether or not they have a

job on campus, the year they are currently(Freshmen, Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Post Bacc),

the school they belonged to, amount of credit hours they were taking, employment status (Full-

time, Part-time, or seasonal), which they paid more attention to (school or work), which extent

are they able to find time to do class work at the level expected of them, and finally their GPA.

The purpose of these questions were to find out how jobs affect academic performance, as the

effect of employment status on academic performance and what the employment status of these

students were.
 Discussion

This is the first graph we included in our presentation. It represents our audience, which

consisted of mostly freshmen students. This data is crucial to have because it allows us to

compare the job/school relationship between different grade levels. We had a total of 130

responses, none of those being post-baccalaureate students.

Figure 1
 This next graph breaks up the respondents by their gender. We had a total of 20 males,

107 females and 2 people who preferred not to state their gender. This information is also

valuable because it allows us to see the difference between genders in regards to how they work

with having a job and attending school. This information also allows us to determine if there is a

specific gender that favors work over school, or if the different genders have any similarities and

differences.

Figure 2
 In this next graph, we wanted to take things further and see which genders acquired a job

during their time here this semester. Our results showed us that, 2 males were full time, 18

females, and 0 prefer not to say. Secondly, 11 males were part time, 67 females, and 2 prefer not

to say. Lastly, 6 males were seasonal, 22 females and 0 prefer not to say. This did not come as a

huge surprise as our female demographic was much larger but we were fascinated to find the

amount of students involved in part-time jobs instead of full time or seasonal.

Figure 3
 The next graph we decided to create shows the relationship between the type of job

individuals have (part-time, full-time or seasonal) and the amount of credit hours they are taking.

Based off of the data, most students that have a part-time job are taking a total of 17 credit hours.

Full-time jobs are the least present amongst our respondents, which indicates that there is a

pattern going on. The one student that is taking >=21 credits has a full-time job, which is

surprising since we figured the higher the credits, the less work hours a student has.

Figure 4
 Years and employment show what type of job individuals have and what grade level they

are in. Most students have a part-time job, then second up is a seasonal job. The data also

suggests that most students, regardless of their grade level, have a part-time job over a full-time

or seasonal one.

Figure 5
 In the spirit of measuring all aspects of academic life/ performance, we decided to

measure how much time these students felt they had for school on a scale of 1-10. (one being no

time and 10 being a lot.) A majority of students answered a 7 which is a fair amount of time.

With this being said, many also answered 8,9, and 10 which tells us that many of these employed

students felt that they still had an immense amount of time left over for school. This tells us that

regardless of employment status, most students have time for a job and school.

Figure 6
 Figure 7

Our group wanted to know how focus was affected with these students and where their

focus was designated and essentially which was prioritized over the other (school or work). A

substantial amount of students who worked part time hours focused on school where a marginal

amount focused on school. The same situation occurs for students who worked seasonal jobs. In

terms of full-time students, the individuals here devoted more attention and focus to work over

school. Essentially this shows us that the few students working full- time hours dedicated more

focus to their full time job over school.

 Figure 8

In this final analysis, we wanted to see how being employed as a student affected overall

academic performance in the way of grade point average. We measured this on the standard

GPA scale (1.0-4.00), with this being said only 4 individuals had a 1.99 or below and they were

part time students. 5 full-time students had between 2.00 and 2.99, 13 part-time and 6 seasonal.

Between 3.00 and 3.99 there were 14 full-time students, 56 part-time, and 17 seasonal. Lastly, 2

full-time students had a 4.00, 8 part-time, and 5 seasonal. We found that regardless of

employment status a majority of each designation all had a 3.00 or higher.

 Analysis

When overlooking the data, our group concludes that having a job does not necessarily

affect school performance. Most of our respondents have a part-time job and still hold an above

average GPA. About 68% of students stated that they have enough time to focus on school and

get their school work done. On a scale from 1-10, most students said they are at a 7 in terms of

having enough time for school. Zero respondents stated that they felt they had zero time to focus

on school.

In regards to our topic, some other questions we could potentially ask can be:

1. How often do you call off of work in order to catch up on school work?

2. What type of job do you have, and do you feel this type of job is beneficial or

detrimental to your academic life?

3. Do you have a job?

These three questions can help our group gather more detailed information, and can help our

conclusion. If our group was able to do this project over again, we would probably start by

making sure we have a good comparison to look at. Asking the question about whether or not

they have a job is very important because it can be useful to compare the data. We would be able

to see if students are less stressed out when they are jobless, as opposed to students who have a

job, regardless if it is part-time, full-time or seasonal.