I have to admit that I was at risk of being a failson – useless and surviving on the goodwill of your family. (It’s a precarious situation.) Wasting away with potential is an awful fate. That’s why I decided to get some paper from a respectable institution. While I did have a decent amount of knowledge for computer stuff, it could easily have been useless trivia for irrelevant things. It’s hard to tell if it’s something useful in industry or as a base for academic research. That, and horror stories from friends about not having a degree hurt their career prospects pushed me to get some kind of higher education.
There’s plenty of options with higher education, but only a few are actually relevant. No way I’d be able to handle Ivy League, but a state/provincial university would basically be as good, and hopefully cheaper. In my case, I actually had one right next door to me, so moving for school wouldn’t have to become a problem.
But as a “lower middle class” (read: poor with a house) person, I didn’t have too many resources, other than some kind of scholarship money that was limited (a few thousand). With that, the only really plausible option was community college, unless I wanted to push myself deep into debt. (But that issue is a discussion for another day…) While there’s some programs and pushes for better affordability of higher education, they unfortunately didn’t apply for me, or weren’t enough to make it affordable for me.