I don't mean to make light of your experience, but I did the same in the late 1970s/early 1980s. I worked several jobs to put myself through a reasonably well-respected northeastern university, and got through 2 bachelors' degrees and a master's in just under six years.
And while I got a great education, and graduated very near the top of my class (top 1%), I'd have learned more, better, faster, in a model where studying was the chief obligation, not keeping myself housed, fed, and clothed by working many jobs. There's a reason why some cultures which value education have tended to give their students and scholar candidates the opportunity to nearly exclusively focus on their studies - in the near term, the return is highly variable, but in the longer term, the return from better-trained students is far higher.
Yes, there'll be people who abuse the system. That *always* happens. But that doesn't invalidate the value of better-educated students who can actually spend time *learning,* not constantly cramming to pass a class to acquire a credential. Look at what happened after the GI Bill - we had a high percentage of reasonably-well-educated people, who had gone to college in a wya that didn't give them a free ride but also didn't make their lives the grind that your life - and mine - was during their college years. The education afforded those people brought tremendous technological advances in every field from medicine to engineering to physics.
I would like to hope that the US, as a nation, finds it in its national interest to provide not merely incentives, but reasonable paths including publicly funded loans and grants, to educate its citizens. At the end of the day, an educated population benefits everyone.