The myth of work-study balance: student strategies and the limits of resilience
基于62名多伦多地区大学生的访谈，揭示学生如何通过选择性就业等策略应对工作与学习的冲突，但这些策略在结构性压力下失效，挑战了将平衡归因于个人时间管理的新自由主义叙事。
This article explores how students negotiate the competing demands of work and study in neoliberal higher education systems, a context where austerity policies and market logic have intensified pressures on both institutions and learners. Drawing on 62 interviews with post-secondary students in the Greater Toronto Area, I examine their adaptive strategies, such as selective employment, which both alleviate and expose systemic shortcomings. When such strategies collapse under unsustainable pressures, like rigid class schedules that conflict with work shifts or tuition hikes outpacing wages, students are forced to further adapt, reducing course loads, delaying graduation, or stretching already tight budgets. Dominant narratives frame work-study balance as a matter of personal time management, obscuring how its deeper structural, cultural, and social dimensions render balance unattainable. By tracing how students’ efforts falter despite their resourcefulness, the analysis challenges neoliberal assumptions that individualize responsibility while obscuring institutional accountability.