I worked full time, while living in an apartment (which I shared with 2 other people) since I was 18. From 19-25 I took classes, about half of them online and the other half on campus — since at the time it wasn’t possible to earn a true Bachelors degree fully online.
My company paid for a portion of my tuition, the rest I paid myself as I went. A semester of courses cost, by my recollection, about $10k. But that would be regardless of if you took 3, 4, or 5 classes. So naturally I went to the Dean and got special permission to take 6 classes per semester. Combined with transferring half my credits from dirt cheap online classes I graduated after only paying for 4 semesters, about $50k total, $20k of which was expensed on the corporate card, all spread over 5-6 years.
My job at the time was technically an “internship” at Cisco Systems, paid $14/hour. I would typically log about 80 a week though, and it was all time-and-a-half after 40 and double-time after 60 hours a week, so effective pay was higher.
My GPA was shit, but it didn’t matter. No one has ever asked, and I got the degree. The amount of learning from being in the labs at Cisco working with core routers and coding IOS dwarfed anything I learned at college anyway.
Everyone told me I needed the diploma. But since then I’ve never had to so much as write a resume, after that first fluff piece I wrote to get into Cisco. In my case the degree was a massive waste of time and money, but so it goes.
Obviously I was massively lucky and privlidged to get into Cisco at 18, but staying there full time for several years and having them pay part of my tuition was because I worked my ass off for that $14/hr and was one of the most productive members of my team. By the time I left they had all but shut down the internship program and HR was afraid I was going to sue them for misclassifying me, but I was very happy to have had the opportunity.