You also need to already have the capital to get a skilled education and to support yourself while you do. Or you could assume large amounts of student debt before having a job, gambling on being able to complete your education and get a job before the payments start coming in. There's a student debt crisis for a reason.

And you better not get too ambitious and pursue a degree that's too difficult, or you won't be able to complete your degree and you'll have all the debt but none of the credentials.

The student debt crisis is suffered mainly by people who majored in non-technical fields from liberal arts colleges. There is a lack of jobs for people who have training in the humanities. That is unfortunate but that is not what I am suggesting.

If you take out a loan for professional training for a skill that is in high demand you will have little trouble paying it back. Software engineering is an example, but really any type of hard engineering training will relatively easily result in a relatively high paying job. There is such a high demand for those jobs in the US that we currently import many of those workers from China and India via H1B.

Not everyone is well-suited to those fields. Starting a degree that you can't finish is the worst choice possible. But even if everyone retrained as software engineers, that would just result in a surplus & everyone would need to retrain again.

What do you recommend?

And how do you recommend pursuing this skilled career when you don’t even have enough money for food, clothes and shelter?

I mean that’s pretty much a working definition of poverty and I’m really curious how easy you think it is to do when you’re hungry, dirty and tired.

America provides food and housing assistance for people living under extreme poverty.

Once you have a stable base it’s a matter of hard work.

Based on your comments, you probably never had a need for food and housing assistance. There's a huge chasm between "extreme poverty" and "stable base" and millions of people are stuck. At least one billionaire profits from keeping people in that limbo: https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/w...

I grew up in poverty under a single mother. My family’s yearly income was never more than $10K growing up. I have the income tax statements to prove it.

I went to the absolute worst schools. Literally F schools.