I worked part time through college. Summers I had two part time jobs, and a couple summers three that worked with my schedule. Started school with about 10k in savings and finished about 12k in debt.
Edit: I'm also super frugal. Found cheap food, cheap/free furnishings/clothes, cheap housing, pirated textbooks, and rode a bicycle and took the bus to get around.
Wish I could have afforded the time for some unpayed opportunities. Really struggling to find a decent job at the moment. (Studied math at a top university with fairly significant cs experience and decent gpa).
Wouldn't not recommend college, but man not feeling too good about it at the moment in terms of job opportunities (certainly wouldn't trade the experience and what I've learned for anything though)
Continue to be thankful. I made some boneheaded choices in college which resulted in my throwing away a full ride, and I left school with like 80k in debt. Thankfully, I am much more fiscally responsible than I was academically responsible, and I managed to pay that off over the course of like 7 years (aided in no small part by the forbearance periods Biden forced through during COVID). Which is good, because more boneheaded choices were made which resulted in a significant change to my financial situation. If I were still making payments at this juncture, I would be in a position where I'd be moving back into mom's basement just to make ends meet.
Not that there is anything inherently shameful in that (it's fucking hard out here, and if that's a resource that you have available, it should not be turned away simply because of pride), but it does cause me to wake every morning pleased I didn't listen to any "financial gurus" out there who talk about shit like "good debt".