College Enrollment and Full-Time Work: The Roles of Scheduling Constraints and Online Education

• In Event: Gender and Opportunity in Higher Education and Work

Abstract

Online education has the potential to reshape individuals' joint career and school enrollment decisions by relaxing some of the scheduling constraints that workers face when combining full-time employment with college attendance. To guide the empirical analyses, I introduce a simple theoretical framework in which online education lowers the negative complementarities between schooling and work effort. Using variation in online program access based on state-level enrollment trends and local access to high-speed internet, I find that a one standard deviation increase in online education exposure is associated with five percentage point higher probability of full-time employment for workers between the ages of 24 and 29 who are also pursuing undergraduate education. Furthermore, enrolled workers in this age group who have greater exposure to online education tend to work in less flexible occupations but earn higher wages. The trends are also observed but somewhat less pronounced for the 30-39 age group and to a lesser extent at other ages.

Author

• Dora T Gicheva, University of North Carolina Greensboro
  Presenting Author