Inside Counts
Categories: Student Experiences | Survey Data
The university does not systematically collect data on students’ employment outside the university. Currently, the best source of information we have on this topic is students’ responses on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE; https://nsse.indiana.edu/), which includes questions about students’ employment status, work location, and work hours. This survey is administered to students in the spring of their freshman and senior years; here we report on senior student responses. CSUN participates in this survey biennially, and this report includes data from the 2013, 2015, and 2017 administrations, for a total of 3,539 responses¹. NSSE data were merged with additional student data from the Office of Institutional Research.
Overall, the data show that the majority of students at CSUN are employed (71.1%). The average amount of time worked per week was about 22 hours. Moreover, students work only off campus the vast majority of the time, followed by working both on- and off- campus, and then only on-campus.
In our next report in this series, we examine how student employment is associated with academic outcomes and behaviors Student Outcomes Associated With Employment and Work Hours
