Generational Poverty

I find myself getting worried about our students, about their success and whether or not they will make it. There are some participants from my original study whose aspirations were high and who wanted to achieve very high goals. Several of them did not achieve those goals and it isn’t because they didn’t try, but because there were other things. This is a complex issue that is so frustrating for practitioners. What I am wondering is if this is because we are trying to change generational poverty. We are trying to interrupt something that is entrenched in a family and it embedded in an individual’s history, context, and biography. So, my questions is. . .does it take more than a generation to break the cycle? Upward Bound is only 40 years old, so it is really too soon to tell if the children of our alumni will all go to college and if what Upward Bound did for them was to change the culture of their families, but they could not benefit from the program in the way that we had intend for them to.