July/August 1998

Working Teenagers: Do After-School Jobs Hurt?

High schoolers who work more than 20 hours a week may be at higher risk for failure

by Karen Kelly

Two decades ago, politicians and educators extolled the virtues of part-time jobs for high school students as a way to foster independence, responsibility, and good work habits. Government panels like the 1980 National Commission on Youth also praised part-time work, suggesting it was "the single most important factor" in the transition from youth to adulthood.

Only a year before the Commission's report was published, however, the first of several warnings appeared, challenging the prevailing view that high school students were benefiting from their after-school jobs. That warning came from Temple University researcher Laurence Steinberg, who, in a 1979 report, concluded that after-school work had a detrimental effect on school achievement.

While Steinberg's work--among the most frequently cited in the field--has generally withstood the test of time, he and other researchers are beginning to focus on the 30 percent or more of students who work more than 20 hours during the school week. Growing evidence suggests that teenagers who work more than their peers after school may be more likely to have been disengaged from school before they took a job. Since all jobs are not equal, however, the search is on to define the most optimal work experience for teens.

These inquiries are not merely academic. Researchers who have surveyed high schoolers on how much they work estimate that one-third are working on any given day and that more than 80 percent hold a paying job at some point during their high school career. Data released this year by the Third International Math and Science Study shows that U.S. 12th-graders work at a far higher rate than their counterparts in the 20 other countries that participated in this test.

While many parents and educators hope a part-time job experience will teach students how to manage their money, research findings suggest otherwise. Steinberg found that only 11 percent of students reported saving most of their money for college, and only 3 percent contributed earnings toward their family's living expenses.

Unlike young immigrants who had to help pay the family's rent in the early part of the century, Steinberg says teens working in jobs today are mainly middle class, suburban, and white-a finding confirmed by other studies. The bulk of their income goes to clothing, cars, entertainment, and, in some cases, drugs and alcohol.

Negative Effects of Work

As one of the first to investigate the effect of part-time jobs on academic success and aspirations, Steinberg has examined indicators such as academic achievement, class attendance, time spent on homework, and attitudes toward school among both working and non-working students. In most cases, he says, the working student is at a disadvantage, with negative effects increasing with the number of hours worked.

"Students who work longer hours report diminished engagement in schooling, lowered school performance, increased psychological distress, higher drug and alcohol use, higher rates of delinquency, and greater autonomy from parental control," says Steinberg.

For example, in a 1991 survey of 4,000 high schoolers in California and Wisconsin, the more hours worked, the steeper the drop in grade point averages and amount of time spent on homework. At the same time, students working more than 20 hours reported using drugs and alcohol 33 percent more often than their non-employed classmates. They also experienced greater psychological symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and fatigue. The emerging consensus among researchers, says Steinberg, is that the negative effects of employment are linked to how much, not whether, a student works.

This view has been confirmed most recently in a 1997 study by David Stern, director of the National Research Center for Vocational Education at UC Berkeley. Stern looked at the body of research conducted on working teens over the past 20 years, separating the surveys into two groups: one that included students who worked fewer than 15 hours a week, and one including those who worked more.

In this latter group, he found 10 studies that reported students working 15 hours or more had lower grades, did less homework, had higher dropout rates, and were less likely to go to college. Only three found no negative effects. "The preponderance of evidence indicates that students who work more than 15 to 20 hours a week while in high school perform less well academically," he concluded.

Is Work a Symptom?

At first glance, Stern says, it may appear that working long hours causes students to earn lower grades, but he stops short of making that claim: "Is it a question of cause and effect, or just some kind of spurious correlation?" he asks. "It could well be that this is just a selection process that's going on, where some kids are heading off to work and putting school behind. It may be that those who are more interested in work, work more."

That's a suspicion shared by researcher Jerald Bachman, an investigator with the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future Project, which surveyed 70,000 high school seniors. Bachman wondered if the students getting into trouble after working long hours were the same students who would run into problems at school anyway. He looked at their grades before entering the work force, their plans for college, and whether they had ever been held back a grade. He found students with low GPAs, no college plans, and a record of retention were more likely to choose a job with longer hours.

"I would argue that most of the problems that correlate with working long hours are more fundamentally caused," says Bachman. "That may contribute to the spiral, but I think that the spiral is well underway at the time they elect to work the long hours."

In his earlier studies, Steinberg did not consider the prior academic record of students. But for a 1993 study, he asked the students to recall their GPAs, their educational plans, the amount of time they spent on homework, and their interest in school before they took part-time jobs. He discovered that the adolescents who worked longer hours were less academically inclined to begin with, and concluded that their drop in GPA was not necessarily the result of their work schedule. In addition, one-third of the working adolescents he surveyed admitted to taking easier classes in order to protect their grade point average.

Not All Work Is Bad

Bachman and other researchers are not willing to write off part-time jobs altogether. They say the most successful job experiences are those that are closely linked to an official school program. Often called School-to-Work or Work-Based Learning (see HEL, March/ April 1997), these partnerships between school and industry provide students with learning experiences in a real-world atmosphere that can, in turn, strengthen their academic understanding.

The majority of teenagers are not working in this type of job, says Stern, but there is evidence that those who are have a more positive attitude about work and fewer academic problems than those whose jobs are not linked to a school program. A successful school-to-work program "must be carefully planned and monitored by people who understand both the work setting and what is to be learned there," says Stern.

In fact, some researchers have found students in work-based learning programs perform better academically than students in the traditional high school program. Larry Rosenstock, former director of the New Urban High School Project, studied work-based learning programs in 23 cities. He found a big spike in college entrance rates among the students involved in these programs.

"In Durham, NC, the mayor took me to visit the health careers program at a local high school," explains Rosenstock. "There, we discovered 90 percent of the kids in work-based learning were going to college, compared to 70 percent in the high school at large."

Most schools don't have the resources to implement such a program, however, and if they do, they're often not sure where to start, according to Carol Clymer, a senior program officer at Public/Private Ventures in Philadelphia, a nonprofit organization that helps high schools start work-based programs. One of the key components in work-based programs, says Clymer, is the opportunity for working teens to talk about their on-the-job experiences. Kids often can't articulate what they're learning at work, so they need time to think about it and talk about it in order to identify the positive components, she says.

While her organization hasn't conducted rigorous research on the subject, Clymer says her observations suggest that many working teens are learning about responsibility, teamwork, and communication on the job.

But in the absence of true school-work partnerships, researchers agree that there's a need for parents to restrict the number of hours a student works, especially if their academic achievement is suffering.

Federal and state governments set their own guidelines: under federal law, students under 16 cannot work more than three hours on a school day and 18 hours in an entire week. The government has not set guidelines for 16- and 17-year-olds, although several states have placed their own restrictions on older teens.

Stern would like to see governments institute a permit process, whereby students would have to have a certain GPA before they could get a job. Bachman agrees that more supervision could be helpful, but he contends that researchers, educators, and parents must begin to identify the characteristics of the ideal workplace experience. He says this is crucial, given the likelihood that school-year employment will remain an important part of the life of many, if not most, adolescents.

For Further Information

E. Bedenbaugh. "Competing for Time: School and Teenage Employment." NASSP 76, no. 549 (January 1993): 74-81.

J. Bachman and J. Schulenberg. "How Part-Time Work Intensity Relates to Drug Use, Problem Behavior, Time Use, and Satisfaction Among High School Seniors: Are These Consequences or Merely Correlates?" Developmental Psychology 29, no. 2 (March 1993): 220-235.

R. McNeal. "Are Students Being Pulled Out of High School? The Effect of Adolescent Employment on Dropping Out." Sociology of Education 70, no. 3 (1996): 206-221.

G. Ruscoe. "Students Who Work." Adolescence 31, no. 123 (Fall 1996): 625-633.

L. Steinberg. Beyond the Classroom:Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

L. Steinberg. "Negative Impact of Part-Time Work on Adolescent Adjustment: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study." Developmental Psychology 29, no. 2 (March 1993): 171-180.

L. Steinberg and S. Dornbusch. "Negative Correlates of Part-Time Employment during Adolescence: Replication and Elaboration." Developmental Psychology 27, no. 2 (March 1991): 304-313.

D. Stern. "What Difference Does it Make if School and Work are Connected? Evidence on Cooperative Education in the U.S." Economics of Education Review 16, no. 3 (June 1997): 213-229.

D. Stern. "The Continuing Promise of Work-Based Learning." Centerfocus, no. 18 (November 1997).

Karen Kelly is a freelance education reporter based in Albany, NY.