While I was still extremely sick and recently moved to the San Francisco Bay, my husband drive myme to see San Francisco so I could see it for the first time in person. It's a beautiful city and I felt unusually inspired by it.
I was a military wife for two decades. I passed thtough a lot of cities briefly in the course of following my husband's career all over the US and parts of Europe and no other city grabbed me quite like San Francisco.
So on the way home we stopped at the bookstore and I splurged and spent $300 on a pile of books to do a self study course in urban planning from my sick bed, basically.
My pile of books wasn't your usual urban planning selection. It included books with a more social focus than is typical of the field because to me good planning is about people and social fabric, not merely buildings and physical infrastructure.
One book was about the origin story for The Clemente Course. This is a college level liberal arts program intended to be accessible to poor people and it has been used in at least one prison.
Liberal Arts education done right is a path out of poverty. One of the anecdotes in the book is about a guy in the course who stopped and asked himself something like "What would Aristotle do?" instead of starting drama that could lead to prison AGAIN.
We make ugly jokes about Liberal Arts, like "Liberal Arts majors ask Do you want fries with that?" Liberal Arts is derided as not a real education because we no longer value a real education.
We have turned college into job training. We expect to get a degree that leads to a career path that justifies the student loans so often involved.
Education prepares you for life. Training prepares you for a particular job. Seeing college as only valuable as job training is backwards and broken and not the historical norm.
College education is associated with lower rates of smoking regardless of income level. That's an example of education helping you understand how to live better.
"Liberal Arts" are so named because they are supposed to prepare your mind for being a free person. They are supposed to be empowering and help you understand how to think your way out of problems.
This is a program which already exists. My understanding is it's free for the students and I believe you should be able to start one locally if one does not already exist in your area.