Is college worth it?

[binary solo]

All depends on what you want to do with your life. If you want to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, architect, vet etc then college is kinda necessary.

If you want to piss away 2-4 years of your life gaining "life experience" before you settle into adulthood I'd suggest travelling the world in a working holiday sort of fashion. I took my family on a holiday to Australia a few months back and we did a 4,500 km road trip to the red centre and back. Every roadhouse we stopped at to fuel up, stay over night or have a break was staffed by at least one young European working tourist. And these are some of the most remote out of the way places in Australia.

Getting yourself into debt, without a reasonable idea of what you're going to do with the education you get from it doesn't sound very sensible to me.

I'm a vet so I had to go to university. But I came out with very little debt because my parents committed to paying for our tertiary educationat least for the first degree, and the cost of university was much lower back then. So I only had to pay off the amount of loan I used to go visit my girlfriend (now my wife) in Macau which was only a couple thousand $. Took 2 years to pay it all off in pretty small installments.

A good approach for those willing, I think, is joining the military and having them pay for your college education. A lot of people get various degrees useful to the military (engineering, medicine, computer science other stuff) and get paid for it. You are bound to the military for a time. But that has it's benefits too.