So don't go into student debt. Go to your local community college and then transfer somewhere affordable. I've now worked with grads from all over the place. I honestly can't tell the difference.
- Are you going to college to escape a really bad situation at home?
- Are you going to college because your local community college isn't good at preparing you for a four-year college and has a bad/incompatible atmosphere?
- Are you going to college because you'll be ostracized by your family (that you love very much) if you don't, even if you (or they) can't afford it?
- Are you going to college because the study that you feel is your life calling can only properly begin at a reputable four year?
but clearly you've never had to deal with that; be fortunate for that
CC CS classes were clown-shoes. The math and physics classes were excellent, but the CS classes were not on par with the expectations that most 4-year colleges have for upper-division classes.
That being said, it was still a very good deal for me; I'd been tinkering with programming for ~8 years by the time that I went to school, and self-study easily got me up to speed. Thus, I took my freshman and sophomore classes for less than half of what it would have cost at a 4-year university.
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Portland State does a proficiency demo for CC transfers with basic data structures questions, (linked lists, binary trees, recursion, etc). If you don't pass, you don't get into the upper-division classes. It's a bloodbath every single year. You don't have much of an excuse to fail, either - they give a description of everything that they will test you on more than a month before the demo[1].
[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/351661090/PSU-Proficiency-Ex...
I could see maybe EE or robotics being something that a good university would have an edge over your local community college. But even here you could get by without access to a good lab if you were motivated enough. Going into debt is almost never the answer.