Working Students in Higher Education

Dear Colleagues,

Working students comprise a diverse and large portion of today’s Higher Education student population. The strategies that these students use for success (degree completion) involve individual, institutional, and structural factors. While research has found that work can have detrimental effects on students’ learning experiences, academic attainment, and social integration in Higher Education, other studies have found that work while studying can be an enriching experience that fosters students’ learning capabilities and promotes academic self-efficacy. The mixed results from previous research can only be analyzed if we consider that working students are a growing heterogeneous group and their experiences can vary across different groups and cultural contexts.

For this Special Issue, we welcome both theoretical and empirical papers drawing from quantitative and qualitative research, but not excluding mixed methods approaches that focus on how personal, institutional, and structural factors can affect working students’ ability to succeed in Higher Education.

Examples of relevant topics include but are not limited to:

• Mature working students and academic learning;
• Gender differences in combining work and study;
• Age differences in combining work and study;
• Combining work and study in different Higher Education levels (e.g., Bachelor, Master. and PhD);
• Combining different types of work (e.g., full-time/part-time, in/off campus) with study;
• COVID-19 impacts in combining work and study;
• Working student parents and multiple role reconciliation;
• Working student from under-represented groups (e.g., racial/ethnic minorities, immigrants);
• Working students with disabilities;
• Student unions and working students;
• Support mechanisms implemented by HEIs to support working students (including strategies to make studies more flexible, e.g., institutional and teaching strategies);
• Teaching using hybrid solutions (face-to-face/off-site) and their adequacy to working students.

Prof. Dr. Claudia Andrade
Prof. Dr. Joana Lobo Fernandes
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.