Your future self will thank you for working while in university

Here’s another reason to apply for that waitressing or retail position at your nearest mall: American researchers have found that working while in university or high school will lead to financial returns in future. This means that the part-time job would not only bring you money now, but will also be pretty helpful to you in the future.

By looking at students’ education and job details over a 20-year US government survey, researchers tracked how these had an impact on the survey participants’ wages later in life, according to Sydney Morning Herald.

Part-timers at university received “sizeable returns, ranging between 4 and 6 percent” while those who worked during high school got returns between 3 and 5 percent.

Hard work likely to pay off for the Millennials https://t.co/0OUEdpKmgy

— Michelle Pain, PhD (@pocketpsych) January 28, 2018

Working while in college produced returns “which are higher than those to any other form of work experience we consider or, for that matter, the return to an extra year of pure schooling”.

“In summary, we find that the returns to in-school and full-time work experiences tend to
be large, larger in fact in many cases than the returns to an additional year of schooling,” the report wrote.

For the survey, more than 8,000 male American youths were interviewed from their adolescence to early adulthood about their education, employment, marriage and fertility, and health, among many others. This research by Jared Ashworth, Joseph Hotz, Arnaud Maurel and Tyler Ransom and his co-authors was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research

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