In the more likely case that you sort of feel like you might give it a shot, Dave Ramsey's advice looks even better: dropping out will only waste money you already had if you were paying out of your savings. It will waste a lot more than that otherwise.
...unless you live one of the many places where the average cost of an even a studio apartment is high enough to immediately eat most of your wages.
In what situation? The way your post reads comes across as vaguely resentful of people who aren't upper class.
Most high school graduates cannot afford university out of pocket. That doesn't mean that they need to lower their bar or that they're somehow at a higher risk of dropping out. Your comment is coming completely out of left field.
Compare:
>> dropping out will only waste money you already had if you were paying out of your savings. It will waste a lot more than that otherwise.
> dropping out will only waste money
Did you not notice that the meanings of these sentences are not related? What is the scope of only in each of them?
No, I feel you extracted a snippet from the grammatical structures it was part of, producing something that only appeared to be a full sentence by coincidence. You didn't leave out context, you left out the sentence you were supposedly quoting, and substituted a different one.
Imagine me quoting your comment here in the form
> if HN would let me... I would leave
Is the problem really that I left out some context?
The average cost of community college tuition is around $3.5k a year. Add in books, fees, transportation, lost income from not being available for shifts etc..., and that’s just not realistic unless you can live with your parents or someone else is supporting you.