The first concept literacy educators must try to comprehend about students with legacies of abuse who want to improve their literacy skills is that literacy and education are both the means to an end and an end themselves. Education, by which I mean the acquisition of a larger repertoire of all types of literacy skills, is considered by many of my middle class acquaintances as a necessary step in securing “a Good Job,” and a Good Job is an entitlement for having jumped through the cultural hoop of acquiring a college diploma. The undercurrent of anxiety for first-year students who are not eighteen and not at least middle class corresponds directly to their anxiety about claiming entitlement to a college education at all, and then about the probability of their being able to realize the Good Job afterward. Education, then, for nontraditional students can represent a ticket out of poverty and abuse—not a necessary but certain step, not even the threshold to that step, but rather, a ticket to a bus out of poverty that may or may not be running. If or when the bus does run a route close enough to catch, it may not stop where the student needs to go. Moreover, despite the tenuous, unreliable means to an indeterminate end that education may represent, as Amy Robillard (2003) in College English points out, education may be conceived of as an escape route that includes opportunities to construct a new life with all the markers of the social class aspired to.