The Impact of Employment and Extracurricular Involvement on Undergraduates' Performance in a Business Statistics Course

INTRODUCTION The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of various academic and non-academic factors on students' academic performance. These include academic course load, on- and off-campus employment, participation in sports and other extra-curricular activities, among others. College students choose to work while enrolled in school in increasingly larger numbers; this is partially due to the rapidly increasing cost of higher education (even in inflation-adjusted terms), but other reasons have been cited in the literature as well. (1) And there are other activities competing for the student's time (and attention): participation in sports--whether formal or informal (e.g., intramurals), involvement in extracurricular activities--such as social clubs, service and Greek organizations; volunteer work, etc. The central question of interest here is: Does greater involvement in these non-academic activities adversely affect academic performance? Briefly, two competing theories can be advanced with respect to the likely direction of this effect. First, outside activities take up time, at least some of which would otherwise be devoted to schoolwork, which in turn can lead to lower grades. Second, students choosing to work or get involved in clubs and organizations are better at prioritizing work, managing their time, and may in general be more motivated than an average student; if so, then this selection bias would lead us to finding students with greater involvement also performing better academically. It is likely, however, that both effects are present to some degree (as previous studies have documented--see below): for example, working several hours a week is associated with receiving better grades, but working too much can lead to poorer performance. (2) To address these issues (and others), we employ a unique dataset assembled over five years in an applied business statistics course taught in a AACSB-accredited college of business at a US comprehensive regional public university. LITERATURE REVIEW Studies linking college students' employment to their academic performance are rather few and far between. Even fewer studies consider the effects of other factors--such as extracurricular involvement--on academic performance. A notable exception is Dundes and Marx (2007) who study academic performance (defined as "hours studied and higher grades") of undergraduate students at a small liberal arts college, and find that students who strike the optimal balance between work and school perform the best. That balance turns out to be between 10 and 19 hours of work per week; moreover, students in this group do better academically on average than all other students, including those who do not work at all. These findings are echoed by Pike et al. (2008) who use data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) to examine the effect of work on first year students' academic achievement. They conclude that working more than 20 hours a week affects grades negatively, even after controlling for a variety of individual student characteristics. The study also suggests that working on campus for 20 hours or less has an indirect positive effect on first year students' grades acting through increased engagement. Similarly, Torres et al. (2011) find that younger undergraduates at two urban commuter colleges in Indiana who work more than 31 hours a week have lower grade point averages (GPAs) and are less likely to complete the courses they enroll in. A different, more theoretic modeling approach is taken by Wenz and Yu (2010), who actually model a student's decision to work while enrolled in school. In general, they find that working has a negative impact on academic achievement; specifically, each work-hour lowers student GPA by 0.007. More interestingly though, the authors conclude that there are significant differences in the academic achievement of various groups of students depending on what motivates them to work in the first place: students working for primarily financial reasons earn lower grades than those who work to acquire career-specific skills, but higher grades than students who simply want general work experience. …