Speaker
Description
Gig work is particularly well-suited to students, offering the scheduling flexibility to fit paid work around academic commitments in ways that traditional employment cannot. This flexibility has made gig work an increasingly common source of income for undergraduates seeking to finance their education. Yet the financial precarity inherent in gig work raises important questions about how financial anxiety shapes academic engagement and career prospects. Drawing on ego depletion theory and role expansion theory, this study develops and tests the mechanisms through which financial anxiety affects academic effort and perceived employability among student gig workers. Data were collected from 193 undergraduate gig workers across six universities in Singapore using a two-wave, time-lagged design. Financial anxiety, work-school conflict and facilitation were assessed at Time 1; in-class effort, out-of-class effort, and perceived employability were measured one week later at Time 2. Path analysis with bootstrapped confidence intervals was employed to test direct and indirect effects. Results demonstrated that financial anxiety was positively associated with work-school conflict (β = .17, p = .001) but not with work-school facilitation (β = .12, p = .13). Work-school conflict mediated the negative relationships between financial anxiety and all three outcomes: in-class effort (indirect effect = −.06, 95%CI [−.12,−.02]), out-of-class effort (indirect effect = −.09, 95%CI [−.15,−.03]), and perceived employability (indirect effect = −.04, 95%CI [−.10,−.01]). Notably, financial anxiety exerted a slightly stronger indirect effect on out-of-class effort than on in-class effort, suggesting that the structured classroom environment may buffer against resource depletion. These findings extend ego depletion theory to the higher education context by demonstrating that financial anxiety functions as a hindrance stressor that narrows self-regulatory capacity, impairing both academic effort and future-oriented outcomes. For higher education institutions, results highlight the need for financial support systems to mitigate the consequences of financial precarity among student gig workers.
