Depends. Can you work? Can you hustle? There's a lot of free money there if you're willing to get it: I will have paid, all told, less than $25,000 for my education, excluding housing because I elected to spend more than really necessary, via scholarships.
A lot of the rest was paid for by working during school--I had the lame little jobs during school, but I also participated in Google Summer of Code and had a pretty healthy consulting company that I started and operated, employing friends of mine when I had more work than I could handle. Like I said--less than $25,000 for the whole kit and kaboodle, thanks to what really amounted to not a lot of work to make that happen. (It also had the nice side effect of giving me a really nice resume.)
In-state tuition is about 14-15k. Room and board is 5-6k. That's easily 20k a year (I paid north of 22k my first year) leading to 80-100k over four years. Not exactly something you can work through on a <$10/hour job (of which I have had many).
Those numbers sound pretty much like mine. They're also pretty meaningless thanks to the incredible opportunities for scholarships at nearly any school you'll care to look at. After scholarships, between family and myself I'll pay around $33,000 at the end of the day (the discrepancy between the aforementioned $25K being the additional housing and other expenses I chose to incur over the most fiscally responsible decisions).
I left school with $9,800 in debt. Most of the amount paid off before graduation (at least 60%) was mine, the rest my parents'.
No, you can't work through it on a sub-$10/hour job. But I had those jobs, too: they were beer and social money. I set up my own consulting company and I did GSoC and made more than enough to put myself in a really good position coming out of school.
I don't doubt it. I'm just saying that for your average person, college isn't cheap. It's cool that you made it work, but for the majority of the population, college isn't an affordable option.
Ah, but if you weren't too cool for school back in your high school days, you ought to be able to go very cheaply. In HS, I applied myself enough to get a good GPA; yes, like many people here I found it dull, but rather than just skipping classes and not doing homework because I was such a goddamn badass hacker rebel, I did my homework in the 30 minutes before classes started each morning and got something like a 3.95.
The local state school where I grew up runs about $1600/quarter. When I applied as a backup, they offered to basically waive my tuition because my grades and SAT score were good. Bright but poor kids should at least be able to get into state school for extremely low tuition.
As an above-average, middle class student, I got a couple thousand in grants. That's it.
Unless you're exceptionally bright, poor, or unique, it isn't affordable. The vast majority of kids (read: average, middle class folks) get stuck paying 85% of the bill.
A couple thousand in grants would have paid half your yearly bill at CWU. Besides, if you get a decent job, it should not take that long to pay off $20k of student loans.
I ended up going to a private school with tuition of around $30k/year. I got $16k/year in merit-based scholarships based solely on my work in HS... as a white, middle-class male. So I got stuck with 50% of the bill; my parents were kind enough to help with half of that. School-mandated co-op jobs (total of 1 year of them, in my case) definitely helped with the rest--that's part of the trade-off. By going to a well-known but more expensive school, I probably had an easier time getting good internships, which in turn helped pay off the higher tuition.
I think university is entirely worth it if you can realistically afford it. I met amazing people, learned some very interesting things that I would not have been exposed to if I were self-taught (Mentor Graphics software licenses are not cheap), and yes, got a piece of paper that says I hung around a certain school long enough to be given a Masters degree. I've got about $30k in debt. It's doable.
A lot of the rest was paid for by working during school--I had the lame little jobs during school, but I also participated in Google Summer of Code and had a pretty healthy consulting company that I started and operated, employing friends of mine when I had more work than I could handle. Like I said--less than $25,000 for the whole kit and kaboodle, thanks to what really amounted to not a lot of work to make that happen. (It also had the nice side effect of giving me a really nice resume.)