Although Professor Bolin has worked at Columbia College in Chicago for the last five years and teaches composition in four different classes, she does not even have a phone extension to her name; never mind an office. When reporter for AlterNet, Alissa Quart, had gone to interview her, the receptionist at the front desk could not even identify her.

Bolin is a mother to a disabled eight year old boy. She cannot afford to replace her broken glasses and instead uses red electrical tape to fasten the contraption together. She shops at the thrift store for all of her clothes, and relies on her father and his fiancé to care for her son when she is busy at work.

The University’s ability to afford lavish modern furnishings for its student lounge contrasts sharply with Bolin’s meager paycheck: at $4350 a class, but never more than $24000 a year, she earns $2000 a month. She has $55 in the bank and $3,000 in credit card debt. She is a month behind on the $975 rent she pays for a two-bedroom house next to railroad tracks in a western Chicago suburb, where every 20 minutes a train screeches by. She must rely on food stamps to feed herself and her son, and because her job doesn’t offer health insurance, they’re both enrolled in Medicaid. While she had never expected to be a top academic, she certainly did not expect to have clothes that had holes in them at the age of 35.

Bolin’s plight highlights the problem with a political system that is focused solely on broadening access to college, while neglecting the inconvenient fact that a good education no longer guarantees that the over-educated poor will stay above the poverty line; particularly in this post-financial crisis world. Between 2007 and 2010, the number of people with graduate degrees on federal aid has tripled according to the US Census. 28% of food stamp households are headed by a person with at least a college education in 2013, up from 8% in 1980.

The over-educated poor are more prevalent than even society at large might presume; “Nobody knows or cares that I have a PhD, living in the trailer park,” says a former linguistics adjunct and mother of one, who lives in Eugene, Oregon, and was on welfare and food stamps. A St. Paul, Minnesota, librarian, who admits that few of her friends have any clue how broke she is, puts it this way: “Every American thinks they’re a temporarily embarrassed millionaire: I am no exception.”

Bolin’s friend from college, Justin Thomas, has a Master’s degree in history. An adjunct at Lake Land College, he teaches between 4 and 6 classes a semester and earns between $1500 and $3087 a class. His paychecks arrive a month after each semester begins, he says, and during those four weeks he can only afford macaroni and cheese with baked potatoes for his two daughters. (Because he doesn’t have full custody of them, he isn’t eligible for food stamps.) “I say, ‘Sorry I can’t afford to buy you anything, even an ice cream,'” he says, getting choked up as he adds, “for me to help my daughters with their dreams, I have to give up my dreams.” Though he has been moonlighting for his father in construction, money remains tight. “I’d love to get my daughter music lessons—she’s talented. But right now I don’t have the resources to take advantage of her ability.”

Law graduates are also becoming downwardly mobile; employment fell from 92% in 2007 to 84.5 in 2012 according to the National Association for Law Placement. The average law student’s debt was also $100,000. Architecture, market research, data processing, book publishing, human resources and finance are a few other professions that have not gained since the financial crisis.

Bolin had been encouraged by her favorite professor, Michael Loudon, to embrace her interest in becoming an academic. He has now retired. However, things have changed since his time as an academic. Back then, 75% of professors were tenured or tenure-track. Now the situation is reversed, and 75% are adjuncts or part-timers like Bolin.

Karen Kelsky, a former anthropology professor who founded a counselling service called, “The Professor Is In,” has some advice for adjuncts like Bolin: Find a “real job.” Her clients pay $300 an hour for e-mail counsel about how to reinvent themselves, and sometimes, to express “rage, despair, and disappointment” about their disappearing profession, Kelsky says. “Adjuncts can accrue massive debt to support their children, destroy their health, teach at five campuses, in a professional death spiral. Once you’ve given it your best shot, it’s time to move on.” She helps people with postgraduate degrees to identify other marketable skills, such as analysis, data gathering, writing, and public speaking.

Although Bolin follows Kelsky’s blog closely, and believes that her advice is sound, she is already stretched too thin working and caring for her son on her own. She struggles to find the time needed to send out a resume or get additional training. Training that would cost her even more than she is able to afford. She has been looking to supplement her income with other work, and had been looking into becoming a speech language pathologist and a campus union organizer. Neither of these ideas had worked out, however.

Social psychologists seem to believe that her problems do not simply stem from her lack of time, they also come from what they call “decision fatigue”. This syndrome plagues the poor, causing them to use extra energy because of the need to make prudent choices on everyday purchases that most people would take for granted (fewer and fewer of us can purchase blindly these days).

In order to stay within her $349 food stamp budget, she has to balance the expensive foods needed by her developing, lactose intolerant son by being exceedingly thrifty with her own food. “I read blogs about people wasting $20 on frivolous things like a photo booth or fancy cheese,” she says. “I’ll never do that.” When so much mental activity is devoted to basic survival, little is left to engage in long-term thinking or to muster willpower—which Bolin well knows. “I need to smoke to relieve the pressure,” she says, as she rolls her own cigarettes. She claims that she is self-medicating; other times, she uses Xanax for anxiety and takes a daily antidepressant. As Linda Tirado, whose blog post on her own minimum-wage existence had shot her to fame last year, writes in her new book, Hand to Mouth: “Being poor while working hard is f***ing crushing.”

The desperation of Bolin’s life comes through particularly acutely when she gazes longingly into antique shops, Austrian bakeries and expensive restaurants. She is unable to afford even a book on feminism at a bookstore.