I'm a 29 year old student. I'm going back to school after struggling with some pretty severe depression and anxiety stemming from a history of emotional abuse from my mother. I've been treating the depression as best as I can and I started going back to school after being unemployed for most of the duration of Covid (I worked for the census during the summer of 2021).
I went back to school because I needed to feel like I was doing something to move on to the next phase of my life. Once I enrolled I immediately lost all of my SNAP benefits, about $300/mo worth of grocery credits. Because if you're a student you are ineligible for SNAP unless you work 20hr/wk minimum. So here I am taking 18 units per semester working on school work at least 50-60 hours per week including studying/homework/projects. I took 10 units in the summer which equated to 6 weeks of 10 hours of lecture every weekday plus homework. I'm taking night classes right now because it's impossible to take both calculus and physics without a schedule conflict. I currently get out of class at 9:30pm twice a week. To top it all off I am getting straight consecutive 4.0's.
To do all that and be told that I'm not working hard enough to be worthy of a bit of financial aid just absolutely disgusts me. And what choice do I have other than take out a bunch of student loans? It's crazy to me that we think it's appropriate to put up all these extra barriers to people trying to get an education to funnel them into these predatory loans. To think that there are people who designed and contributed to this system just makes me sick to my stomach