VOC Rehab only supports community colleges, unless you get a scholarship to pay for everything. I went to UM Rolla in 1986-1987 with a student loan, but ran out of money to live on. So I returned home and attended a community college while living with my parents. I started working in the Computer Lab while earning an IT degree and got a couple jobs, but I was too busy working to earn a Bachelor's degree. My Associates was good enough until the 1999 Dotcom bust, where they raised the degree to a bachelors to do my job. I returned for a Bachelor's at the University of Phoenix in 2005. But I became disabled due to a mental illness in 2003 and could not work a job.

I paid off my student loans, but college was expensive. I applied for 100+ scholarships and won none of them. I came from a middle-class family where my father was a phone installer for AT&T/SWB and barely made enough to make ends meet with three children and a wife. I learned BASIC on a Commodore 64 I shared with my two brothers, and got into BBSing with a VICMODEM 300 Baud MODEM.

Now there are Hacker Bootcamps to learn how to code without a STEM degree.