Is Being a Working High School Student Good?

Belle Xiong-Schnitzler

Student fast food workers

Did you know that 30% of high school students are employed? Even further question: are you one of those students? Because if you are then this article is for you.

When you’re in high school you probably have all of this pressure to get good grades and make people proud of you. But imagine trying to balance school, work, and any extracurriculars that you are in. Not just that but you could potentially fall behind no matter how good of a student you are.

It can take away personal and social time

Walden University’s list of pros and cons about being a working high school student notes, “It can hurt academic achievement… students who work up to 20 hours a week suffer from reduced academic performance.” Although this may come from a University this is just an average of working students it is not all working students. 

In addition to this Hera Mueller, a working SPASH student said, “Usually I work 2-3 times a week… I socialize during school or during youth.” The thing is that we don’t actually know how many hours she works, so we don’t know if she has any time to socialize or to just sit back and relax before having to do the typical teenager night schedule. But Hera is just one example of a working student. 

Justin Tyler is a SPASH student as well as a worker at Metro Market. He is the complete opposite of Hera. When he was asked if it was hard to balance school and work, his answer was, “I would say sometimes.” 

With his job he has a lot of co-workers who could take his shift if he is having trouble with balancing school and work. But even a good student could fall behind. Another question asked was if it was hard to balance school and work. Keeping the fact that he works at Metro Market you would think that he gets a lot of time to do homework but if he’s falling behind sometimes it points to a problem that goes deeper than people realise. 

Is it All Bad?

Even though there are a lot of bad things that come from working and balancing school there are still good things that can come of it.

One of the things that a job teaches students is how to save money and to only buy what’s necessary before becoming financially independent.

Another thing that having a job can do is keep students out of trouble. Walden University wrote, “Summer jobs have been shown to decrease incidents of violence by disadvantaged youth by 43%.” Not only that but another thing that was written was that, “jobs can also teach students the value of money” when most students get jobs their parents make them the necessities that they want and that will show them that not all of the things that they want are things that they need. 

In his interview Justin said, “A lot of times I don’t work too much but I do get a lot of free time.” Which tells you that even with school, work, and other things people can still get free time, it’s just that they don’t acknowledge it enough.

In Hera’s interview however she said that her work environment was fun and that she enjoyed spending time with her coworkers because they were fun and entertaining. This just shows that even with no social life you can still have a social life inside of the work environment. 

In the end though it is your choice to pick what job you get or when you will get one. Just make sure that before you apply you think long and hard about if you can balance 2 different lives.