Postsecondary financing strategies: how undergraduates combine work, borrowing, and attendance

Original publisher: Washington, DC : U.S. Dept. of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, National Center for Education Statistics : [Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O., distributor, 1998]. OCLC Number: (OCoLC)39689821 Subject: College costs -- United States -- Statistics. Excerpt: ... NTRODUCTION I Did not borrow, worked 34 or more hours / week while enrolled One concern in developing a cumulative measure of work status for the BPS: 90 / 94 students was that students ' working status might change over time. For example, a student who worked an average of 32 hours a week while enrolled one year and not at all the next year would have the same cumulative average as someone who worked 16 hours per week for two years, but these two situations might not have the same consequences for persistence. Generally, however, stu-dents ' working status remained reasonably stable. Seventy percent of students who worked less than 15 hours in their first year and 61 percent of students working 15 - 33 hours in 1989 - 90 had the same status for their cumulative variable ( table 1 ). Among students who initially worked 34 hours per week or more, 41 percent had the same status for their cumulative variable. Another 49 percent reduced their work week to average 15 - 33 hours. Relatively few students showed a ma-jor difference in their work pattern cumulatively compared with their first year. For example, only 1 percent of the students who worked an average of less than 15 hours per week in 1989 - 90 and 4 percent of those who worked 15 - 33 hours had a cumulative average of 34 hours or more. It should also be kept in mind that a shift in category could actually represent a small shift in ac-tual average hours worked ( from 14 to 15, for example ). Table 1 - Percentage distribution of 1989 - 90 first-time beginning postsecondary students according to cumulative Table 1 - work status through 1994, by work status in 1989 - 90 Worked Worked Worked No 1 - 14 15 - 33 34 or ...