Abstract:

In Portugal, working students in higher education represent currently around 8.5% of total students and 13.2% of polytechnic students. They are mainly adults that have been in the labour market for several years and return to education for getting a new opportunity to increase their qualifications. With different characteristics and motivations to study, these non-traditional students might also have different determinants of their academic performance, which justify the use of discretionary educational policies.

Particularly, some employment variables are expected to have a role on the academic performance that goes beyond the effect of work intensity. Only in some recent literature it has been recognized that this relationship is more complex and prior investigation on work-family and family-study relations was extended to the analysis of the work-study relation (Creed, French & Hood, 2015; Meeuwisse, de Meijer, Born & Severiens, 2017). The main conjecture of these studies, that some employment variables are work-study conflicting and affect negatively the academic performance, while other facilitate the work-study relation and have a positive influence on academic performance, receives support by their results.

In this study, we aim to extend previous literature by jointly considering, for the first time to our knowledge, three dimensions that are expected to have a significant influence on academic performance: personal characteristics, course characteristics and employment variables. The considered employment variables are related job (with the scientific field of the course), qualified job, self-employment, dimension and public/private sector of the employer organization.

Our database was built by crossing data from four different sources and by adding some constructed variables of 323 working students who have graduated at Leiria Polytechnic in Portugal. This data was then used to investigate the determinants of their academic performance, measured by the final grade point average and by the completion time.

The results show that the academic performance of adult workers is explained by different determinants, as compared to traditional students.

Working students with a less favourable socioeconomic and professional background are found to have a superior academic performance, suggesting that the education of workers may have an important social mobility effect.

We also found that the work-study relation is facilitated by higher involvement with their jobs (which is the case of self-employed males), by higher motivation associated with the aim of finding a new professional career, by more schedule-flexible jobs and by working in the public administration sector that generally offers better conditions to study. On the other hand, the higher responsibilities of qualified positions that consume more time and effort than unqualified job positions, and working in larger firms may contribute to increase work-study conflict.

Following the investigation of the particularities and determinants of the academic performance of a sample of workers from a Portuguese polytechnic school, we delivered some policy indications for both central authorities and local institutions to create a favourable environment to promote the participation and performance of these students in higher education.

Keywords:

Adult education, higher education, academic performance, student-workers, work-study interface.