Title:
Does Student Employment Account for Inequality in Academic Outcomes? Evidence from Italian Higher Education

Abstract:
The relation between higher education and work has been extensively studied by sociologists and economists. While most of these research focus on the work after higher education, less attention has been devoted to the experience of working during higher education. Interest in this topic is growing in the United States and Great Britain because of the rising costs of attending higher education. Up to now, research on this topic has obtained contradictory results. In Italy the topic has not been so widely analysed despite its relevance. The importance of this issue relies on several considerations. First, employment during university studies is quite spread regardless of low tuition fees and the small number of students who study far from home. Second, there is not a formal distinction between full-time and part-time students and there are no part-time courses for adult learners and for employees. Third, the amount of drop-outs and graduations behind schedule is very high and it has been raising quickly in the youngest cohorts. Fourth, still nowadays there are inequalities in the rates of graduation among different social categories. Thus it is interesting to understand whether and to what extent students’ employment affect the probability of dropping-out and having a delayed graduation (i.e. the consequences of students’ employment). Looking at the equity side, it’s also important to determine whether social origins affect the decision of working during university studies (i.e. the antecedents of students’ employment). In this paper I examine the role of student employment – i.e. working during university – in the reproduction of social inequality in academic outcomes in Italian Higher Education during the 20th century. In the first part, I review previous research results in the US, UK and Italy and discuss several competing hypotheses. In the second part, I use data from the Italian Longitudinal Household Survey (ILFI) to study a) the relation between student employment and academic outcomes; b) the relation between social origin and student employment, and c) the mediating effect of student employment in the relation between social origin and academic outcomes. Bivariate analysis and multinomial logistic regression models show that full-time students are more likely to graduate on time than working-students, but only high-intensity work has a detrimental effect on dropping out. Social origin affects the probability of being a high-intensity worker, but not the likelihood of being a low-intensity worker. Finally, results from a non-linear decomposition analysis suggest that the overall role of student employment in the reproduction of inequality in higher education is low while the most important variable is the type of high-school attended (especially lyceum vs non-academic).