I didn’t go to my dream school. Now I’m living debt-free.

This was probably the greatest decision I've made in my entire adult life, maybe besides getting a job in tech. It's a very privileged choice for sure, I'm lucky to live in a state where our state university is one of the higher ranking public schools in the US (RU rah rah). But I've also saved (no exaggeration) hundreds of thousands of dollars if I went to my actual first choice school in Boston. Plus I got to live/work in Boston afterwards anyways.

I think that possibly the single most important financial decision I've ever made it my life was to go to a so-so university with a full scholarship rather than a really good university where I'd have had to take out a loan. Graduating without debt allowed me to survive on a much smaller income, which in turn freed me up to make some expensive short-term decisions in favor of a larger long-term reward: for example, I was able to practice greater patience in my job hunt, and I was able to move to a different country where my skill set was in much greater demand and my living expenses were very low.

However, when I was choosing a university, I did not foresee this. I was a scared, inexperienced 18-year-old with no idea what I was doing, and I very nearly made a much worse decision: virtually all of the adults around me (other than my parents) were pressuring me to go to the best university that I could get into, especially since I would likely qualify for financial aid.

However, I grew up in a very financially stressed family and developed a severe anxiety about money. I ended up not applying to a lot of universities I was interested in because I didn't want to spend that much money on application fees. All of the universities I applied for accepted me, and I chose the cheapest one for me to attend (which ended up being almost free; years of squirreling away all of my birthday money and Christmas money covered the rest). Intellectually, I thought this was a bad decision — adults were telling me over and over that my university degree was an investment and that it was worse going into debt for — but I was just too anxious to spend any more money than I absolutely had to.

Upon graduation (in 2008), the economy tanked, and that's when I knew I'd made the right choice. All of my other experiences since then have just reinforced it: the amazing life opportunities I've been able to pursue, the struggles my peers (who went to better universities) went through and in some cases are still going through, the total lack of interest employers have had in details about my education (university, specific major, GPA, etc. — all that has mattered to them is that I have a degree and that it's in some kind of STEM field), etc.

My wife and I both graduated from a big southern state school a few years ago. It's known more for football than academics.

Aside from the financial aspect of picking an "inexpensive" state option, we were afforded an opportunity to excel academically that may have been lacking in a more prestigious university. Most students wanted to get in and out. There wasn't the same competition I'd expect at more prestigious universities. We always liked being in school and took advantage of several cool project opportunities that set us up for future success. My wife got paid to do a degree and has the same job as Ivy League graduates. My Master's degree was also fully paid and I landed my dream job before I even graduated.

My point here isn't to brag, but to address that I went to a school that was viewed as a "last resort" for most of my peers (who were all academically driven). I severely undervalued my choice until a few years ago.

I went to a state school and it was definitely the best choice (it turned out to be one of the formost unis in the field I ended up pursuing actually), but I think it's unrealistic to present them as making it easy for the average student to be debt-free. I had merit-based scholarships that amounted to the entirety of tuition PLUS $1000 extra each year, and I still needed to take out the maximum of my federal loans to afford food and housing during college. And that was only with one year of being required to live on-campus -- I just missed being required to live on-campus for two years, which would've probably required my parents to take out parent PLUS loans or me to take out private ones.

It was definitely a lot better than going to a private college would've been financially, but I think it's unfair to paint "debt-free college" as a realistic option for most people even if they attend the cheaper options.

For me it was just an obvious choice. I found out my parents couldn't pay for my tuition. So Out of State school prices were ridiculous. Even living on campus was expensive, but I could swallow that. Fortunately I got into a couple schools within commuting distance.

I didn't skip college/university outright and so had to deal with loans for the two years I attended, but dropping out ultimately put me in a much better position than I'd been in had I graduated.

In my case I was fortunate to have cultivated some very basic ability to write software in high school and college, even though that had absolutely nothing to do with my major. To keep things short, what happened is that while I was still in school I saw the bills racking up and got spooked, which led to me dropping out. I was dead broke for a few years, but in that period of time I was able to take that rudimentary code-writing ability and polish it into something decent enough to get my foot in the door of the software dev industry, which I was then able to turn into a career, which then allowed me to pay off those loans, build credit, and eventually buy a house.

Had I followed through to graduation, I probably would've been doing ok, but compensation and job security wouldn't have been anywhere near as good and I probably would've had those loans haunting me to this day, a decade after I would've graduated.

That said, I don't think education/degrees are totally useless; I'm now pursuing a degree relevant to my field, which I think will improve my prospects a little. The difference though is that now I can pay for this out of pocket, skipping the whole mess with debt entirely, which makes the investment a lot less questionable than it was when I was fresh out of high school.