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This introductory chapter sets the context of my research on working undergraduate students in Canada. I begin with a discussion of how the undergraduate experience has changed since I was a student in the early 1980s because of changes in higher education and labour markets over the past 40 years. Although students engaged in term-time work then too, patterns of work and studies and motivations for work were quite different. Today, most students rely on financial help from families and many graduate with debt. In addition to reducing debt, term-time work is seen as part of students’ process of developing an employability portfolio. This shift reflects important changes in conceptions of human capital and in the employment relationship.
I argue that these changes make the educational experience more complex, especially for working students who juggle work, full-time studies, and other priorities. To examine the implications of changes for contemporary students, this book draws on the Hard Working Student longitudinal research project, which I led between 2018 and 2022. I introduce themes that include the pressures students feel to be planful, employable, and productive; and the importance of attending to contradictions in temporalities and rhythms and to social markers of difference in analyzing working students’ experiences. In providing an overview of chapters, I introduce metaphors for working student experience that are based (somewhat playfully) on the circus arts of juggling, high-wire walking, contortion, and sword swallowing.