This closely mirrors my experience, though my "summer job" straight out of my Freshman year of college was part-time cashiering at a pizza restaurant. From ther

This closely mirrors my experience, though my "summer job" straight out of my Freshman year of college was part-time cashiering at a pizza restaurant. From there, I temped as an office worker at a startup, convinced them to hire me full time and let me build databases, then pivoted that into writing Java code. After a year of work wherein I made about $25k, I talked to the financial aid office and found out that my expected contribution towards tuition, room, and board was likely to go from about $5k/year (barely covered via loans and family support) to $15-20k, which was totally untenable. My response was to drop out, keep coding, and figure out how to backfill the CS knowledge I needed by working with smarter, more experienced people than myself. 15 years in, it seems to have worked reasonably well, and I'm regularly reminded how much easier my life has been not having tens of thousands of dollars worth of student loan debt hanging around my neck throughout my 20s. To be clear: I know that the plural of anecdote is not "data", and I don't want to suggest that the dropout -> tech industry path is easy or in any way guaranteed. However, I think that it's a far easier field to get into than many others if you have the aptitude and motivation to build some things on your own and learn as much as you can from the process.