I am in college right now, and after one year I and a friend got summer internships. I made $43 per hour and my friend got just under $8000 per month plus heath insurance, which was nice because she is on Medicaid. I was surprised I got an internship because my grades aren't the best, but I did apply to a lot of places. This was after freshman year of college, so neither of us had taken more than five CS classes, in total, in our whole lives. Neither of us had any programming experience before coming to college.

Over that summer we were both able to pay off our first years worth of student loans for the tuition that finaid didn't cover. A different friend of mine took last semester off to work at Apple, and got free housing right by the new spaceship campus thing.

There are a ton of recruiting events on campus, and the place I worked over that summer offered to hire me part time over the year. Obviously life isn't all about internships, but being able to pay tuition and send money home is a giant plus. People say college is lame, but I think if you can get in somewhere decent or even not that great it would be a good choice. I also know a ton of transfer students from community college who are in their mid to late twenties and less commonly in their thirties. You could always just apply to some places and see how that goes before making a final decision.

One other thing is that I am taking a lot more math than I thought I would have to when I came in as a freshman, so just make sure you like math.