Lots of high school students don’t just go to school: They work other jobs, too—be it flipping burgers, babysitting or stocking shelves at the family business. Iit used to be that teens who went to school and worked were destined to make more money in their lifetimes once they graduated, but that’s not so true anymore.

Economists Charles Baum and Christopher Ruhm studied youth from the class of 1997, and they found that students who worked their senior years in addition to taking classes tended to out-earn their fellow graduates by about 4.4 percent. Not bad; but when Baum and Ruhm studied graduates from the 1970s, they found that those older graduates out-earned their one-time classmates by 8.3 percent.

The moral: Working while you’re in school pays off, but not as much as it once did. (The Atlantic)

Paul Asay has written for The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Beliefnet.com and The (Colorado Springs) Gazette. He writes about culture for PluggedIn and wrote the Batman book God on the Streets of Gotham (Tyndale). He recently collaborated with Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, on his book The Good Dad. He lives in Colorado Springs with wife, Wendy, and his two children. Follow him on Twitter.