I was accepted into college however I am unable to go. I did not qualify for financial aid and I have no money to pay them. Here's to GoFundMe hoping I can get the money. 

Life sure is frustrating. Why does college have to cost so much that even if you get a job between: rent, gas, utilities, and family costs education is put entirely on the back burner. 

Go to college.... So you can pay for it the rest of your life.

I'm very sorry, it's very unfortunate. Is the school in the USA? It isn't like that everywhere in the world.

Going to give a little background here. I have 3 kids. I have been to college before for small things and decided I wanted to go for something in the gaming field. I didn't qualify for financial aid due to my income last year. However I am not employed right now. I am looking for a job. Unfortunately while trying to respond earlier one of my kids spilt a drink on my computer...? So it's gone now too.... Yey. I will continue to keep y'all posted. Yes I'm in the US. I didn't qualify for loans due to no job.

Here's some encouragement........I was pretty unmotivated when I was younger, and I really had no idea what I wanted to do. I ended up going to a local community college and took a class in programming.  It was in old HP basic. Turns out I was good at it so learned Fortran on my own, took a class in PDP-8 (yeah I know LOL!) assembly language and bought a book on 3D graphics.  Then I took a class in Fortran but since I already knew it, I asked the teacher if I could do the homework in C and he said yes. So I learned C  ... Then still with no degree I got hired by a major semi-conductor company as a software technician and worked my way up to engineer pretty fast.  I worked there for over 25 years, learned numerous languages and made good money.  99% of what I know I learned on my own from books and the internet and for a long time I didn't have the interment to help me. I'm still learning......

So here's the thing.....Programming is one of those skills you can learn on your own if you are suited for it. You really don't need a college education. A degree will of course help you get a job but I've seen a lot of crap programmers with degrees.  So if you really want to do game programming, I'd just get on with it.  My best tip is books are still better than the internet for learning stuff from scratch, so you might want to invest a bit in some reading material. Programming is best learned hands on. There is no replacement for simply writing code.

On 5/27/2018 at 4:55 PM, Halpmelurngewd said:

Go to college.... So you can pay for it the rest of your life.

That shouldn't be true if you're shopping around and making informed decisions.The cost varies by location, but shouldn't be a debt you carry for life. Assuming you're in the US, here's a quick little table you can check for the average cost by state. And since it is the average, you can find cheaper than the average.  A quick web search shows there are about 6000 colleges and universities in the country to choose from and about 3500 have computer science degrees.

Assuming you qualify for local state-sponsored schools, you should be able to get your first two years at a community college for around $6000 total, and your bachelors degree for around $16,000 on average. Less if you shop around.  That's about $22,000 for four years. If you can't offset that with a part-time job and/or scholarships (I highly recommend both) then you'll need to get that on a student loan.  Assuming you can maintain your employment once you're done, you should be able to repay that in 5-10 years, possibly less.

While some companies place some stock on which schools you attended, in practice it doesn't particularly matter nearly as much as the fact that you've got the degree.  

I'll assume you've tried everything possible for scholarships and grants. They are effectively free money to students and many great scholarships have no applicants each year, sitting idly by waiting for somebody to submit an application. You should search for new scholarships every semester since many open up after a student drops out or fails to maintain minimum standards.

The cheaper school may not be the popular schools nor the big-name schools, but they still have a valid degree and give you the opportunity to learn, study, and master all the topics you need. Assuming you finish your academic program and work as a software engineer, the university studies should pay for themselves within the first year of real-world employment.