Working while studying: How modern day students juggle study, work, and social life

There was once a time, long ago, when being a student meant some very simple things: lectures by day, pints by night, and a desperate scrabble to produce academically legible work at some point in between. Today, it means the cold drudgery of updating your CV, buying LinkedIn Premium, praying your Wi-Fi stays strong during your MyTutor gig, and feeling the slow rot in your brain take hold each time you open ChatGPT to do your thinking for you because the hours have piled up, and your bank account has shrunk. Student life seems to be giving way to something more real and more complex. 

This is a phenomenon undoubtedly reflected in the numbers. Students are spending less and less time on their studies, decreasing from 13.6 hours a week last year to 11.6 this year. Paid work creeps up on us long before deadlines do. Employment is no longer a term-time fling; it’s a marriage, a house, and the full-on mortgage. 65% of students have some kind of employment alongside their studies, compared to 38% in the 1980s. Key to this is that over half of those surveyed say they’re working to survive, not to have extra money to spend on Depop. 

Rent is up all over the country, food costs more – with the number of students using food banks doubling between 2022 and 2023 – and even the bus fare (it costs £6 a day to take the U1 bus from Leamington to the University Interchange and back). Working whilst at university, a time when getting a degree should take priority, is no longer a quirky lifestyle choice, but a new unwritten rule. 

Although a part-time job can be great, making you feel more like an adult and helping you become more self-sufficient, organised, and mature, research has suggested there is a major tipping point at 17 hours a week. If you go over that, you learn less, despite earning more. With 68% of students in 2025 working part-time, it seems that students’ studies are bound to suffer.  

Free time seems to be becoming a popular myth, along with the honest student landlord and a cheap pint of beer

However, university isn’t just about exams and tutorials. It is, of course, as that obscure relative says to you at a drinks party, besieged by memories that stretch back to a time “that you wouldn’t recognise”, a time to enjoy and savour. Yet, when your shift at Five Guys on Wednesday, or your gig in the student bar on Sunday, gets in the way of your ever-shortening student life, this vision fades all too quickly. 

“It’s hard to feel part of the student community, or part of your friendship circle, when you have to work on the weekend,” said one MORSE student, “Sometimes I do feel like I’m missing out”. Students who juggle long working hours whilst their work scales up as they reach their final year are finding it harder to form friendships, or even go to campus. Free time seems to be becoming a popular myth, along with the honest student landlord and a cheap pint of beer.  “I was doing 25 hours a week alongside uni work; I had no time for anything else. I’d get up, go to my shift, then cram till I fell asleep before my seminar the next day,” said one Economics student. 

A new part-time job market has emerged: drop shipping, online tutoring, content creation, and copywriting

Another defining feature of the 2020s student is the side hustle. Gone are the days when the only work available was a bar shift in the Old Library or a day job at Pets at Home. A new part-time job market has emerged: drop shipping, online tutoring, content creation, and copywriting.  

This new quirk of the “20s student” offers flexibility, away from the 9-to-5, away from ‘in-person’ working. Yet it is important not to romanticise this lifestyle. This wave of alternative ways to make money is borne out of economic necessity and job scarcity, with nearly one-third of students surveyed in a new report saying they would like a job, but are unable to find one. 

This shift in working habits reflects an effort by students to adapt to an expanding gig economy, one that is bound to shape the employment landscape of graduates as well. It’s a great showcase of adaptability, but it also reflects the ever-more desperate lengths students are being forced to go to in order to fund their studies. 

To be fair, many universities are responding to these issues and doing their best to support their students. For example, 48% of universities include information about part-time work on their websites, with many providing job ‘hubs’ listing details of jobs to help students with their search for employment. Many also provide jobs for students on campus, such as working in a students’ union, but many also advertise other jobs in the local area. Others are assessing the structure of student life, focusing on more flexible timetables and blended learning, like Birkbeck University, which offers distance learning, allowing you to work a full-time job whilst still remaining in education.  

The years we were told to savour forever, where we were meant to make friends for a lifetime and gain crucial skills to succeed in life, instead feel like a cautious step into a saturated job market that […] does not actually want us

Perhaps in time we may see a shift to a new kind of learning, as universities adapt to a new reality, where students are not just exam codes or ID numbers, payment pots, or empty seats in seminar rooms. They are commuters and carers, unable to clone themselves to attend their 9am. 

The question should not be whether students should work, as that is what they are being forced to do. Instead, the question should be how can universities ensure that the work their students undertake outside of their studies does not sabotage the education that it is helping to finance in the first place?

Higher education is drifting further from what our parents told us it would be like, what our politicians experienced, and what our younger selves dreamed of. The truth is now a bleaker one: silent study rooms, with half-finished coffees and tired eyes. The great irony is that the years we were told to savour forever, where we were meant to make friends for a lifetime and gain crucial skills to succeed in life, instead feel like a cautious step into a saturated job market that, according to the Financial Times, does not actually want us. Still, we must continue to prove our worth, whilst also struggling to fill our freezers.