Are there any studies to back up your assertion?

This is just an impression from counseling with college-age adolescents over the years. Working for money sometimes seems to help them build the discipline to work at their studies.

I'm in my 3rd year of university, and I've always thought that having a job during the year will force me to use my time wisely and study. I'm the type of person who lives everything to the last minute, including studying for my much hated pharmacology course (pain in the ass!). I considered that having a part time job will not allow me to waste my time and force me to make the most of it, not to mention give me some spending money/money to pay off my student loans in the near future.

Yes, that is similar to what many college students have told me about a part time job. You put it well: it will "force me to use my time well."
Thanks for writing.

This is nothing new, people who are successful will tell you that they come from families that demanded they work along with attending college. Some only had to work during breaks but most had to work right along with going to school. I had always had one main job while I attended school fulltime and would take a second job when I only had a couple classes during break. The first time I took a second job I went to school in the morning, then to my first job and sometime went to my second job right after. One Christmas I went to school 8am-12pm, worked my primary job 2-8 or 3-9, would come home do homework caught a couple of hours of sleep then off to work at the post office warehoouse from 12-7am(seasonal work) then start all over the next day. You do what you have to do but that has been lost on this recent generation. The parents these days treat their kids as if they are so fragile that their child should not work hard for anything in life. They have set up a workforce of kids who will walk off a job because they did not like the hours that day and their parents will agree with the child and tell them it's ok not to go back and how dare they make their child those hours. Customer service is horrible now, parents have to blame themselves. How are we to expect these kids to be civil to us, the consumer when the kids and theirs parents are not civil to each other or whatever....Holding a parttime job is great, espcecially if the student is getting something from it like a great work ethic. For most it is just a way to waste the employers time just taking up space from someone who would have loved to have had that job. I wish employers could sue the people who are negligent on the job like those kids who bathed in the sink, or the ones who thought it was funny to mess with the food at Jamba Juice. Until that starts to happen we will have to contend with mediocrity in the work force that no amount of school could help. I know it was about how having a job could help for graduating but these kids these days will find away to blame something on anything to not graduate....

You seem to imply that because they have a part time job they graduate, but maybe they have a part time job because they are more hard working and focused in the first place and thus more likely to graduate regardless if they have a job or not. This article further feeds in the work frenzy culture of this nation, as illustrated by the previous poster Sarah B ( no offense intended). Many people in the US live for work and theyre lifestyle pays, one of those people is my roommate who is a pre med undergrad like me. We both take 18 credits of heavy science in school but he has a 20 h/week part time job. I work hard but I still have time for myself to relax and unwind and enjoy my youth. My roommate on the other hand cannot study on saturday or sunday due to work and slaves till 5 in the morning on sun after work to finish his chemistry labs, during the week all he does is study and eat and on thurday nights he spends all night trying to cram in everything so he can see his girlfriend on the weekend after work. Does that make him responsible? Definitely... Is this good for him? Nope Does this mean that i am more likely to fail? I think not

While it is hard to get the mix of work and relaxation "right" as you say, people suffer much more from having no work to do (unemployment) than they do from overwork. In the words of an immigrant friend who worked 12 hour days 7 days a week: "Having too much work is never a problem. Having no work is a problem."

Touche doc...your words ring very true.