Education Alone Cannot Overcome Structural Barriers

Anchored to: the argument that structural interventions, not education alone, address root causes of housing instability

I want to say something that might sound like it undercuts my own life’s work: financial literacy education, however well designed, cannot fix housing instability by itself.

Housing policy too often operates from a deficit assumption, that people experiencing homelessness simply lack skills or knowledge, and that education is therefore the priority intervention. My own research pushes back on that framing in a specific way: structural supports, housing subsidies, emergency assistance, living wages, combined with appropriately designed education, produce better outcomes than education alone ever could.

This matters because it would be easy for a program like mine to imply that better curriculum design solves housing instability. It doesn’t. It helps people navigate a system that, for many of them, is genuinely stacked against them, more effectively than generic financial literacy would. But minimum wage levels, rent stabilization, tenant protections, and the availability of emergency assistance are policy questions no curriculum can substitute for.

I’d rather be honest about that limit than oversell what education alone can do.

Where do you draw the line, in your own field, between what good programming can fix and what only policy change can fix?

Author: Sandra Roussel
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