Background: While many nursing students work during clinical semesters, little is known about employment characteristics and relationships among employment, academic success and other variables.
Purpose: To describe the demographic, educational, and health-related characteristics of clinical nursing students and the relationships among employment, semester grades and other characteristics.
Method: Descriptive, correlational.
Results: Participants were BSN students (N = 1014) from four southern US universities who were 22.6 years old (SD = 4.6) and most likely to be Caucasian (N = 832, 82%) never married (N = 852, 84%) females (N = 886, 87%) with mean GPA of 2.97 (SD = 0.61). Most students (N = 670, 66%) reported semester employment averaging 16.7 (SD = 8.3) hours/week. Although no relationship was found between hours worked and semester GPA (r = -0.017, p = .588), race/ethnicity (F [2, 1003] = 19.87, p < .0001) and nighttime sleep hours (F [3, 997] = 7.841, p < .0001) had significant effects. Students working in healthcare had higher GPAs (M = 3.09, SD = 0.61, p < .0001) than non-healthcare workers. Students working daytime (M = 3.04, SD = 0.65, p = .031) or irregular shifts (M = 3.04, SD = 0.56, p = .036) had higher GPAs than students working evenings.
Conclusion: While employment status did not influence GPA, race/ethnicity and amount of reported sleep did. Additional research is needed to provide evidence-based advisement recommendations for employed students.
Keywords: Academic performance; Nursing education, BSN, Student success; Student employment; Undergraduate nursing student.
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