Does Work Inhibit Cognitive Development During College?

Abstract

This longitudinal investigation of 23 colleges and universities sought to estimate the impacts of on- and off-campus work on standardized measures of student cognitive development across three years of college. With controls made for student background characteristics and other experiences of college, there was little evidence to suggest that either form of work inhibited cognitive development in the first year of college. In the second year of college, on-campus work had small negative total and direct influences on science reasoning, but neither form of work inhibited students’ writing skills. Both forms of work had a significant curvilinear relationship with a composite measure of end-of-third-year cognitive development consisting of reading comprehension and critical thinking. Part-time on- or off-campus work had a positive influence, but on-campus work in excess of 15 hours per week or off-campus work in excess of 20 hours per week had a negative impact. Finally, across all years of the study, the cognitive impacts of work appear to be essentially the same, irrespective of student characteristics (e.g., ethnicity, gender, age, precollege ability, full-or part-time enrollment) and whether or not the student attended a two-year or a four-year college.