Or you could try to do that, and utterly fail like 90%+ of the people who do.
Reference? I'm pretty sure I have seen quite a few people work their way through college and they did quite fine. This idea of starting out your post-college life with thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of debt can't be a good feeling.
The minimum cost of living is nearly twice the average pay of an uneducated person.
I did not "finish" college, but I don't consider college being the definition of "educated". Education can come from many different angles. I self-taught myself to program and do that pretty damn well. What programming theories did you learn in college that were applicable to a day to day job? Having mentored quite a few college grads, they are pretty green when they get out of college
but mostly for the fact that getting hired without a bachelors degree was literally impossible at the time.
Finally the truth and the reason that people are brainwashed into paying thousands of dollars for an education that doesn't really prepare them for the job market. The easiest example I always see is source control. Most college grads have never used any type of source control management so this ends up being the first thing that has to be taught to a new grad. If colleges were preparing people to be programmers.... that is a pretty big skillset to acquire.