Up to 14% of community college students are homeless, new study says
This doesn&#x27;t surprise me at all. We&#x27;re now in a place where a non-skilled career doesn&#x27;t get you much more than minimum wage, and if you absolutely <i>have</i> to have a college degree to get a job, you&#x27;re willing to make sacrifices to do it. So what is someone to do?<p>The answer traditionally has been &quot;take out $40-200k in student loans,&quot; but does anyone realize how terrifying that can be for someone making minimum wage? Imagine having to risk 4x your current salary based on the <i>promise</i> you&#x27;ll get a job, except you&#x27;re learning that for a lot of people it isn&#x27;t working as advertised. It&#x27;s an insane risk and&#x2F;or sacrifice we require <i>to just survive</i>.<p>I run a computer science academy that&#x27;s free until you get a job (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lambdaschool.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lambdaschool.com</a>), and I can&#x27;t believe how many people we talk to that just $1,000 of tuition would be a deal-breaker for. I was talking to one of our best students last week and learned that she was living on the floor of a relative and trying to use a touchscreen and some half-working cloud editor to code because she couldn&#x27;t afford any type of computer, even the cheapest $50 version. It was really slowing her down, but she had no other option, and didn&#x27;t know what to do. (Don&#x27;t worry, we shipped her a computer.) I hadn&#x27;t even thought to ask.<p>The crazy thing is the value of taking someone from unskilled to skilled is enormous; we see $50,000&#x2F;yr swings in annual salary <i>all the time</i>, and they get that for the rest of their lives. So say they work for 40 years, that&#x27;s a $2m increase in lifetime salary pre-tax. The cost of us training them to get there is &lt;$10k. But we frequently ask people to either go into an amount of debt or to try to cashflow on minimum wage. It just doesn&#x27;t work.