I started out at community College and got an internship at the state. The people I worked for at the state pressured me to transfer to university.
I lived on my own and survived off the 13 bucks an hour 20 hours a week and student loans.
Preparing for my third university semester, my student loans got rejected. They cited "you went from a Junior to a Sophomore" as the reason, didn't accept "I went from a 2 year program to a 4 year program" as an answer, and wouldn't tell me why it took them 2 semesters to come up with this rejection reason.
Never qualified for Pell or FAFSA. My parents were broke, but the house they foreclosed on a couple years later was too much equity for me to qualify for student aid.
Then the state fired me because of budget slashes (I interned for the Department of Education in the late 00s).
So I dropped out and carried the debt with no degree for a little over a decade, the principle actually rising, before I converted the debt to a consolidation loan and paid it off in 3 years.