Work intensity and non-completion of university: longitudinal approach and causal inference

Researchers focused upon the work–dropping out connection tend to show a U-shaped relationship between the likelihood of dropping out and the number of hours worked outside school, with a higher exit rate for both non-working students and for students whose working hours pass a critical threshold. Yet the data typically used by these researchers are drawn mainly from cross-sectional surveys, and as a result does not allow for any causal interpretation. The present article uses an event history analysis of Canadian longitudinal data covering seven years of a cohort, and offers original findings on the causal work–dropping out relationship at the university level. We find evidence showing that the evolution of the exit rates and the factors influencing the decision to quit a particular university programme differ substantially between students who want to enrol in another programme and those who do not. For the latter, we observe a critical threshold of 24 h of work, beyond which negative effects in terms of non-completion start to appear. We find no negative effects arising from not working vs. working a few hours. Our findings thus tend to show that the higher exit rate among non-working students evidenced in cross-sectional data should be attributed to the fact that academic difficulties cause some potential university dropouts to stop working and to devote more time to school.