Here's what it's like to try to get a higher education without money

Jessica English, mother and student, is a source in MPR's Public Insight Network.

The problem with poor people is that they make bad decisions and don't create or contribute enough. Right?

As a person who has worked for years only to live under the poverty line, I am disgusted. All summer long I listened to debates, both state and national, about how much our government should cut from programs for the poor. Not whether we should make cuts, but how much we should cut.

I have heard all about the value and virtues of the hard-working wealthy, and what a burden the rest of us are on the economy. During the Minnesota government shutdown, I asked myself why people making millions in Minnesota should pay the same percentage of taxes as the working class to fund programs that benefit me. During the debt-ceiling debate, I wondered whether I really was worth big government help, or if that money might be better off in the hands of the job creators.

There are a lot of people like me, working hard and going to school and making poverty wages, who want to get out of poverty and off government assistance. On our wages, we simply cannot work our way out of it. Do the math; it doesn't even require algebra. Sit down with me some night at my kitchen table.

One program considered for cuts this summer, the Pell Grant, gives the poor an opportunity to get an education and get off the dole. Republicans were hoping to cut the Pell Grant program by billions of dollars this summer. This spring, even President Obama initially proposed cuts to the Pell, although one of his first acts in office was to increase funding for it by $17 billion as part of the stimulus package. That package, along with federally subsidized student loans, offered me the opportunity to go back to college.

For the past two years I have been diligently earning my associate of arts degree while working and parenting four children. I have not been lazy, or taken the opportunity for granted. I have earned one B; the rest were A's.

The Pell Grant paid directly for my community college tuition, but there are many costs beyond tuition. I used student loans and a childcare grant to just barely cover the costs of childcare and books. I also worked part-time in a work-study position. Two years into my education, I have a college math class to pass, and then I want to transfer to the University of Minnesota to earn my bachelor's degree in English.

But when I got my financial aid award letter for 2011-2012, the news was devastating.

The need is great, and the programs cannot help everyone. By the time the Pell Grant came around to me, the money was gone.

This semester, without the Pell, I am using student loans to pay for my tuition and books. I'm hoping for a childcare grant, and I will finish my math class and my Associate of Arts through the charity of friends and family who have given me money and are watching my kids for free. Midway through the semester, I am discovering that relying on the charity of friends and family is a lot more precarious than receiving a grant.

Without the Pell Grant for next semester, I cannot transfer as planned to the more costly University of Minnesota. What's worse, if I do not continue my education by fall 2012, I will have to start making payments on my student loans. With my poverty wage from a part-time job, the loan payments, an estimated $100 per month, would bankrupt me. But unlike a corporation or business, I do not have the right to bankruptcy on my loans because it is student debt.

Those who advocated for the millionaires of Minnesota asked me to consider their plight all summer long. Well, one thing I would like the privileged people of this state to consider is this:

The working but impoverished people of this state have been on waiting lists, some of them for years, to get help with the basic costs of housing, childcare, healthcare and education. Maybe we get help, or maybe we simply get passed over.

We continue to work through our wait, shuffling bills, begging for charity from friends, because programs that are supposed to help are actually quite inadequately funded to meet the need. These are programs that should never have been targeted for cuts in the first place - not during the worst recession since the Great Depression, not with record unemployment.

The conscientious people of this country ought to know that there are many who legitimately need and qualify for a safety net or a program, but we are not being put on programs. Instead we are put on "wish lists." For those who are on a program, wake up, because you may be next. Speaking in Cannon Falls, President Obama said, "We cut in this debt deal about a trillion dollars' worth of spending over 10 years."

That's why I hope that the poor people of this country will bend their backs, in this election and the next, not for the purposes of the privileged, but in the pursuit of justice.

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