As an engineer, you may 'only' make 60k/year to start, but there is a much higher range of salaries you can achieve, as opposed to 4 years of sales. With a 4 year engineering degree, you may be making 120k+ after 10 years of working. You're not going to get that high without a degree, even with your 4 years extra of sales work. You'll be able to pay off that 60k debt (which is a very high number, after scholarships/part time work/etc) a lot quicker. Since we're talking about engineering, a person with a degree will always get the job over someone with 4 years of sales or whatever else experience. If you want a STEM job paying 60k+ a year, you're going to need a degree. I'm not saying you should graduate with no work experience. Internships are pretty abundant for engineering, and are the perfect opportunity to get work experience during college, and offset a large portion of the cost. I'm in a very large university, in the college of engineering. 80% of the people I know get internships over the summer. If you can't/don't want to get an internship, there's other options like a research assistantship or lab worker. Like others said, it's not going to be easy, and you'll have to work towards it like its a full time job. But, if you put in the effort, the degree is definitely worth it. I'm only writing about Engineering here, I doubt it's the same for many other majors. About alternatives to Georgia Tech - I'm at the University of Minnesota, which was #11 engineering in the US when I started, and i'm pretty sure it's in the top 20 almost every year. There's a 90% job placement rate for a bachelors of engineering, with an average of 63k/year salary starting. Tuition is a lot smaller than most big schools, especially for being high ranked. It's about 15k for books/tuition. After 5 years, I have about 4k of debt total, without any help from my parents. Definitely an option to look at.