How Many Hours Can a Student Work Without Affecting Their Studies?

Research Project

Spring 2018 EDT 180C Group C5

Professor Lewallen

Jordan Chappelear, Yijia Huang, Diana Medina Zamora

20 April 2019
 Group C5, How Working Affects College Students

For this research project, we decided to analyze the possible academic consequences of

working a certain number of hours within a week. In order to gather the information needed for

this analysis, we used Google Forms to create a survey that asked a series of questions related to

the question at hand. The survey was comprised of the following questions: What year study are

you currently, how many hours a week do you work, do you work days or nights, do you work

on or off campus, do you work on or off campus, do you feel that you can adequately carry out

all your responsibilities, has your GPA been affected? We received a total of 89 responses.

Our first chart depicts survey participation by year of study. The freshman class is

presented disproportionately with over have of the total number of participants. We ended with

51 freshmen votes, 20 sophomore votes, 13 junior votes, and 5 senior votes. There was a steady

decline in numbers as the year of study increased. This was not surprising due to the fact that the

survey was open to EDT 180 students, which many Teacher’s College students will take during

their first semester.

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 Group C5, How Working Affects College Students

Our next chart illustrates the number of hours that the respondents work in a typical week.

Respondents were asked to answer with a number, then we set ranges from 0-20 (part-time), 21-

40 (full-time), and 41-60 (overtime). The minimum number of hours worked was 0 hours and the

maximum were 45 hours. This also was not surprising because most students who responded

were freshmen who usually work no more than part time.

As seen in the next graph, most students work off campus. A small percentage of the total

respondents work on campus and a majority of that number is made up by freshmen; however,

most of the freshmen (seventy-two percent) responded that they worked off campus. We were

surprised to find that none of the juniors surveyed work on campus; all 13 answered that they

work off campus. Only one of the five seniors surveyed answered that they work on campus.

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 Group C5, How Working Affects College Students

Respondents seem to generally feel capable of carrying out their responsibilities (picture

above). Except for one student who felt they could not carry out their responsibilities (responded

with 1) and few other outliers, most students answered between 5-10 on a scale of 1-10. The

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 Group C5, How Working Affects College Students

number responded did tend to lower as the number of hours worked by the respondent increased,

which is understandable because students with more time consumed by work or school will

probably not feel as in control of their responsibilities.

Another question we felt would be beneficial to this research was to ask if the

respondents GPA has increased, decreased, or remained the same when they began working.

Most respondents answered that their GPA had remained the same. It was peculiar, however, to

see that an equal amount of people responded that their GPA had increased as the amount who

said their GPA had decreased. It was surprising to see this because we thought if there was a

difference at all, it would most likely be a decrease due to the amount of time being taken away

from studies for work. As seen below, this is not the case and the numbers remain similar.

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 Group C5, How Working Affects College Students

Once we finished the analysis and charts, we came upon some conclusions regarding the

data obtained. First, most students tend to work less than 20 hours a week whether they work on

campus or not. Also, higher level students work more often than freshmen and they feel even

more capable of carrying out their responsibilities. Overall, the data was somewhat inconclusive

in terms of our topic question. While some students did show that working more affected their

studies, others felt that it did not impact them as heavily (as can be seen from the GPA graph).

We believe in order to make this research more dependable would be to have more respondents.

In addition to this, some more survey questions would likely have improved our understanding

of the data. A major issue was the fact that we did not ask if a student works at all in the first

place. In the instances that students answered that they work 0 hours a week, they most likely did

not have a job. Some of the questions we should have added were: Do you work? How many

hours do you spend at school (in class and studying)? What is your GPA? What was your GPA

before working? We believe these questions would have strengthened the results and our

understanding of the respondents. Overall, our research does give some perspective as to how

working a certain amount of hours can affect a student.