While this is a bit off topic, I agree here. I use to believe in the whole "well if you're poor go get an education or skill" thing. However being a recent grad and finding it's impossible to get a job, my perception has changed a bit.
Being a recent grad, your whole future has been adjusted down. If you are lucky enough to find a job, you won't be paid the same as someone who got the same job in an economic boom. So your whole working life, you will get an X% increase from whatever your current at the time wages are, based on a lower salary to begin with. Through no fault of your own, through no reflection of ability. You really should be inventing something IMO.
It's pretty bad for you, but you were still able to go to college. Like I said, I've only been working for a year. I teach mostly middle school kids how to build chopper style bicycles. Most of my students, 12-15yrs old, don't know fractions. Some don't know multiplication. One school we get kids from didn't have science or english teachers for several months. Didn't have books. Some have parents in jail, some who didn't graduate high school, so no educational support at home. We hold events sometimes where the kids show off what they've done at the shop, and no parents come. We have some high school kids as well. None of them have learned to drive, a rite of passage for middle and upper income teens. If you have no access to a car or can pay for driving school, you can't learn to do it.
One high school senior we have was lucky enough to get into a magnet school. Got a college prep education. Volunteered every year for at least 3 different programs each year since he was in 8th grade. Applied to the Naval Academy and got his letter from Congress, but didn't get into the Academy. He did however get into 4 other schools, none of which he can afford to get into even with scholarships. He's spending this summer volunteering and trying to find work welding to earn some money.
He's an exception though. Most of the kids in the neighborhood I work in are unlikely to make it past high school because there is no support around them for anything. And kids need that, no matter what circumstance they're in. They need to have people believe in them, to spend time showing them they have value, to push them to try. If no one ever pushed a kid to try, rich or poor, they aren't going to develop the life skills they'll need to even put a foot on a path to success. If you don't tell a 10yr old or 11yr old that they can do something, praise them when they do, get them to try again when they fail, they aren't going to be able to do jack shit when they get older.
And I've got great kids. The top section of the neighborhood kids. They get some of that stuff above from our program, and they work hard when they get there. But the kids who don't come to the program are extremely unlikely to make more than poverty wages unless they sell drugs.
Anyway, a derail but the absurdity of, 'don't be poor' is headshaking.
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