The academic performance of student-workers in higher education – increasing rapidly regions’ intellectual capital

Abstract

Although in recent years access to higher education in Portugal has expanded, there are still some people who interrupt their academic progression and enter the labour market not because of lack of skills but because of monetary constraints. Thus, returning to school is considered of great importance to mitigate this discrimination and, at the same time, to reinforce regions’ intellectual capital and workers’ qualification, promoting labour productivity and firms’ competitiveness in the short run – being therefore important for both dimensions of equity and efficiency. 
 Even though the determinants of academic performance, as a proxy for the effective acquisition of skills and 
 growth of intellectual capital, have been deeply studied for the traditional students, the different characteristics, 
 the lack of time and the multiple motivations of adult student-workers justify them to receive an independent 
 treatment. In particular, it is expected for adult student-workers that job characteristics play an important role 
 determining their academic success. Therefore, based on an extended set of observed attributes, which allow us to control for individual and degree characteristics, we develop two regression models to find out how job 
 characteristics affect the academic performance (measured by the final grade point average – GPA, and by the completion time) of adult student-workers in higher education. 
 We use a longitudinal dataset constituted by 332 student-workers that have enrolled in an undergraduate program at Leiria Polytechnic Institute (IPLeiria) in 2008 or 2009 and have completed it until 2015. The data was obtained by matching an internal dataset of IPLeiria with data from the Ministry of Education and Science, Portugal. 
 The results show that student-workers who finish their degrees behave similarly to the non-worker students in their academic performance, but with different determinants explaining it, especially in the case of final GPA, where job characteristics play a more important role than individual and degree characteristics. In detail, we found that self-employment and enrolling in a degree from a scientific field unrelated with the professional activity have a positive effect in the final GPA of male student-workers, and that exercising a qualified job or being employed in the private sector may limit academic performance as these workers tend to choose more demanding degrees. In addition, flexible professional schedules, peer effects, higher average grades within-degree and improved academic integration all seem to contribute positively to the academic performance of student-workers. 
 We expect that our work contributes to develop policies that improve the academic success of student-workers and increase the participation of adult workers in higher education, thus enhancing regions’ intellectual capital, labour productivity and firms’ competitiveness in the short run.

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion