I'm going to take a contrarian approach and say that I'm actually really glad that I had to pay my way through college with loans. I started with ~$200k in undergrad loans and have ~$45k left.

First, without having taken those loans, I wouldn't have been able to go to the kind of college I did or establish the career that I now have. Full stop. Tuition and lodging was ~$40k for my first year. My parents definitely couldn't afford to send us there with cash, and no job or saving would've paid me enough to pay that note.

I specifically avoided going to my comm college for my first two years despite it being free because I really really REALLY REALLY needed to leave my house. I had a ton of issues with my dad that only got fixed after leaving the house. We're cool now, but I don't think that would have been our outcome had I not left.

My college (and me learning how to code) was the biggest reason why I went from graduation to a $125,000/year salary within two years of graduating. While I might have gotten the same outcome had I gone to a comm college and transferred, the age of the people I interviewed for my job that did that did not suggest this. Perhaps I could've gotten a foot in the door by going to a Hacker school or dogging it on my own; I don't know. My school (stevens tech) and my course of study (Computer Engineering) made it really easy to get interviews at top places for great jobs; that's all that mattered to me and that's all that matters now.

Also, who knows what decisions I would've made in those two years that I didn't make because I left. I love my folks, but they are pretty bad with money and don't know anything about my industry. I was also not very good at socializing with people going into college; moving to NYC and going out and about fixed that and has helped me immeasurably since. I wasn't good at dating and kept bouncing back to a relationship with my first girlfriend to avoid having to look. She was a lovely person, but we had very different families, life goals and personalities. I am incredibly thankful for the years I spent earning how to date and branching out to other women; I would never have met my soon-to-be-wife without that experience. I have college (and the loan that enabled me to stay there) to thank for that.

The money thing leads me to the second reason why I'm grateful for having taken those loans. Between trying to pay these loans back, my salary and reddit.com/r/personalfinance, I learned a SHIT TON about how to manage my finances. I have a spreadsheet that tells me everything about my money: who I owe, what I owe, what services I have, how much they are, when they started and stopped, etc. More importantly, I can copy it, edit some numbers and instantly have a model for what my finances will look like if I buy a house, have n kids, buy an additional car, etc. It's paramount in helping me negotiate salary and helped a lot in predicting what my finances would look like after moving to DFW from NYC.

The ONLY reason why that spreadsheet (and my financial health, which needs work) exists is because of student loans.

Now, it would've been GREAT if I didn't pay for college like my peers did. But I wonder how much money I would've wasted had I been in that situation. I could've done a wa better job of using the money I made from my time in cooperative education paying back my loans. Didn't have the financial discipline. When looked at from that way, I think learning how to manage my money through student loans INCREASED my future worth because I can now make better and more confident decisions about how I spend my money.