2015 Theses Master's

College students’ time use and labor market plans

Werbin, Gregory

I examine the patterns of association between college students’ time use and their senior-year labor market expectations. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, I investigate the relationship between reported time use and students’ plans after graduation. Specifically, I consider three labor market outcomes: whether students intend to work full-time work after graduating (regardless of field), whether they intend to start working in a job (full- or part-time) that is a step in a desired career, and whether they apply to at least one graduate school. The problem reduces to determining which time use components are associated with each outcome, and then quantifying the relative strengths of those associations. Using elastic-net penalized regression for variable selection, I find that the activity most negatively associated with full-time job plans is time spent in class, while socially-oriented activities are the strongest positive predictors. This result can be explained by the inverse relationship between full-time job plans and applying to graduate school.