It’s a long road for someone who never even expected to go to college.“It wasn’t in my family’s experience,” she said.After high school, Garcia applied for a job at a local school because she liked working with children. She worked as a lunch lady, then a teacher’s aide. One day, a teacher she worked with took her aside and told her she should consider college.“I was 20 before anybody said [that],” Garcia recalls. “[It] was very wonderful, this teacher that said, ‘Go to college. You’re good at something.’ So I did.”And she did with a vengeance. Garcia enrolled at the University of Utah, where she earned a bachelor’s degree, and then went for a master's in education. She put herself through college while working minimum wage.It’s an experience that gave her real insight into the issue of student debt in America. “I was as rock-bottom poor as it comes,” she said of her situation when she chose to go back to school. She funded her education by singing and taking part-time typing jobs. “I was making minimum wage and so was my husband. And we were able to work part-time and put ourselves through college, saving every little dime that we could save,” she said.But that’s not a path that she thinks is still open to others today.“Because college was affordable for me, I’m where I am today, instead of being a lunch lady,” she says. “That’s not the case for someone in my position who’s living today what I was living.” She supports better state-level funding of higher education, as well as promoting more accessible loans and scholarships to make college a reality for more students.She knows a little bit about what it takes to be a politician. In 1998, Garcia ran for a congressional seat in Utah, challenging then-incumbent Merrill Cook.“The main thing I remember is that I beat her, pretty handily,” Cook, a Republican, told Refinery29 about that race, which Garcia lost 43% to 52%. He’s not surprised that she’s still leading the fight on education.“She focused on the union aspect a little more than the personal; I was surprised that she didn’t support more dollars to classrooms,” he said. “Didn’t seem to argue with me over the bureaucracy aspects, but clearly someone very committed to quality education, and had no room for any kind of voucher program or privatising of some aspects of education like I had supported in Congress.”