Calls are rising for America’s aging high-school model to modernize, in part by accommodating work experience through hands-on internships or actual employment for students. Timely research from Denmark, recently published in the Economics of Education Review, gives us a glimpse into the potential pluses of such a change and identifies potential guardrails.
A quartet of researchers attempted to measure the effect of employment during high school on student achievement, cognitive skills, and risky behaviors. The legal working age in Denmark is thirteen, and an average of 17 percent of young Danes report working in a paid job at that age. By age sixteen, the average is 62 percent. Analysts look at the effects of being able to work on ninth graders, the last compulsory grade in Denmark. This approach is valuable since other research has typically focused on older high school students. Danish students aged fifteen to sixteen—that is, typical grade nine students—are allowed to work up to two hours on school days and a maximum of twelve hours per school week. The most common occupations are in sales, delivery and warehouse assistance, office work, kitchen assistance, cleaning, industry production work, and postal and library services.
To address the endogenous selection into employment, the analysts strove to ensure similar environmental backgrounds—such as family, school, child care, and neighborhood—by concentrating on twins. These pairs had to be the same gender but could be identical or fraternal. Those they studied were born between 1996 and 2002, lived in Denmark at age sixteen, had a job in grade nine, and completed the mandatory portion of grade nine’s final exam. Researchers also accounted for the skill level, behavioral outcomes, and work experience of students prior to grade nine. The final sample size included 2,236 individuals.
The study measures the returns to work experience accumulated during the first eight months of grade nine only (a notably short amount of experience), controlling for industry and gender. They omit the last three months of grade nine so they can measure outcomes—including GPA from grade nine exit exams, school absences, and dropout rates—during those last few months. One additional outcome, incidences of criminal charges, is measured in the subsequent year.
The key findings illustrate the mostly positive benefits of working in high school. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase (corresponding to three additional work hours) around the sample mean of work experience—again obtained during the brief eight-month observation period—increases the percentile rank on the grade nine exit exam score distribution by 2.3 percent, decreases the probability of being registered for a non-traffic-related crime in the following year by 0.9 percentage points, and increases the years of schooling completed by age twenty by one month. The researchers also find suggestive evidence that work experience reduces school absences and school dropouts in the last three months of the school year.
There is, however, a sweet spot in terms of working hours. For example, students with school-year employment during grade nine work four hours per week on average—but the most positive effects appear at the higher average of seven hours per week and the optimal number of work hours is roughly ten per week in order to see a boost in exam achievement. Working in excess of the legal limit of twelve hours during a school week appears to leave too little time for school work, resulting in negative impacts.
The bottom line appears to be that, with some care, productive work and effective schooling can coexist for many high schoolers. Perhaps this model can complement the career-technical pathway currently in vogue—the difference being learning about building solar panels for credit in a classroom versus actually building solar panels (on a part-time basis) for pay in a real workplace. The idea is also related to both summer employment—which holds promise—and potentially a “job study” program for our lowest performers in danger of dropping out. No matter how we situate these programs along a continuum, one thing is for sure: It will take a strong commitment to blur the lines between high school, college, and career to get it right.
SOURCE: Rune Vammen Lesner, Anna Piil Damm, Preben Bertelsen, and Mads Uffe Pedersen, “The Effect of School-Year Employment on Cognitive Skills, Risky Behavior, and Educational Achievement,” Economics of Education Review (March 2022).
