Without going into too much detail: I am exactly one semester away from a degree in the natural sciences but can no longer afford to attend classes - I am a single father with 3 children (two of which live with me) and I pay child support every month to my ex-wife who makes ~$80K per annum. I played her way through graduate school but she left and we divorced very soon after she finished school.
I am almost 40 years old and I have been looking for a steady job for months...but imagine trying to convince someone to hire you for a job with the schedule restrictions that come with having multiple children in a lackluster economy.
I could go on but the message here is simply that poverty can easily be a self-perpetuating condition that becomes extraordinarily difficult to extract oneself from. It often seems like I am caught between multiple Catch-22 situations like some sort of 6-dimensional Chinese finger-trap.
I have also lost access to education because of resources multiple times. I cannot stress how much this has impacted me materially and in terms of morale, both in the short and long term.
The amount of inertia that the self-perpetuating condition, as you aptly put it, is staggering to many that aren't actively experiencing it.
It is difficult to know what aspects of being poor are seen as urgent --or even actionable at all-- by others. Communicating this is complicated, and I haven't been satisfied by the general discourse on the subject, personally.
I dropped out of college because I had to work 30 hours a week minimum to afford it. There just wasn't enough time. All I did was work, school, and homework. I was staying up until 4am doing homework, and then nodding off at the wheel all the way to school a few hours later. Something had to give. Giving up the job was a non-starter. There wasn't anything else to give up. So I gave up school. And that marked the beginning of my battle with depression. I'd grown up quite poor, but I'd never been depressed about it. Because the future I saw was me going to college and becoming successful. Once off that path, a real, deep existential horror that I'd never felt before set in.
That's exactly what I did, funny we posted at the same time. I worked 30 hours a week with fulltime school too. I was able to pull through it though and graduated. Took me 6 years instead of 4 total, but looking back, I would've purposefully taken even longer had I known it was actually one of the best times of my life. I had the benefit of starting at a community college though, which saved money, and those 2 years were easier. I also took other classes at other local community colleges to transfer the max into my university as well once I was there.
Yeah, you're right on the time management part for sure. I was the most efficient with my time during that period of my life than I've ever been. Basically work, class, study in library, repeat. It's not that bad, people are capable of more if they choose to. Best time of my life. It doesn't get better for sure. I've worked like a slave since then, with zero intellectual stimulation as I had at school other than what I seek out on sites like HN.
I've spent 20 years trying to decide what I could have done differently. Usually I conclude that I should have taken out loans. In my defense, I was 16, knew nothing about loans, thought they were scary, and had nobody to advise me otherwise. My single mother was working full-time to support two other kids, and didn't have the bandwidth to help me with school. Besides, that was back in the days before student loans became the foregone conclusion they are now. It only just now occurred to me that I could have blown off the homework, and graduated with lower grades, but there is no way 16-year-old me would ever have considered not doing homework.
Kids are the easiest, fastest (9 month) way to guarantee a life of poverty. Make them get jobs if they're 12 or older. I started working at 12 (paperboy) and never stopped 25+ years later!
My advice is to stop school, work a bit, save up, then finish off that last semester class by class while working.
I worked 30 hours a week while going to college, not because I had a wife or kids, but because no one was helping me and I had to pay rent/bills on top of the loans.
Sorry to hear that. If you are in the US, I am guessing that you can't take out any (more) student loans? They come with a 6 month grace period. Might get you through the semester to get your degree. Maybe you already know that and have done so. You might be able to talk to your school administrators and see if there is any chance of a tuition waiver as well. They should have resources to help. Good luck.
