When asking new adult students in college classrooms to identify the top barriers to their success in higher education, the most common response still shocks me: "My family." Other common responses include: "balancing school with work," and "juggling work, school, and family." Universities and society echo and even encourage this perspective. A billboard for a major university declares: "Work, Life, MBA, Balance it All." Some schools hold workshops on Work-Life Balance. Other schools offer tips for "Juggling Work, School, & Life." Meanwhile, drop-out rates and divorce rates rise, while graduates find that the career boost they hoped the degree would offer is not there.
With the conventional wisdom almost universally espousing balancing and juggling as metaphors for success, how could so many fail so often when attempting to balance and juggle school against work, family, life?
Because balancing and juggling are losing metaphors for adults pursuing higher education.
- Balancing creates mutually exclusive life compartments, forcing difficult decisions that drain potential from all life compartments. School versus family. School versus work. Career after diploma.
- Juggling recognizes that many life compartments exist, but the metaphor only allows a momentary touch of one compartment while the others hang in the air. No ball gets adequate attention. Dropping one ball means dropping them all.
Whether balancing or juggling, a degree is only as valuable as the knowledge, tools, relationships, promotions, and career we earn while pursuing the degree; this is where synthegration comes in.
Synthegrate® offers adult working professionals a practical, integrative approach to synthesizing life compartments by leveraging higher education as a vital force for transcending self while elevating family, work, career, and life. Stop using failed metaphors like "balance" and "juggle," and start the mind shift to synthegration®. Synthegration® allows us to stop methodological myopia by converging perspectives and disciplines to solve complex problems in dynamic and challenging environments.