So don't go into debt to go to university then. I think that's pretty easy if you avoid the US for your undergraduate degree, and it's probably also possible in

So don't go into debt to go to university then. I think that's pretty easy if you avoid the US for your undergraduate degree, and it's probably also possible in the US with some planning and careful university choosing. And if you pick the field of your PhD with some care you can do a PhD without going into debt, even in the US. You mention medicine and law as fields were you need to go to university, but you forgot also the vast majority of research. I think some subfields of computer science, because of their youth, are still the wild west and it is possible to do research in them without a PhD (like the author of the article), but even in those it's hard. In math you definitely see almost no research at all being done by non-PhDs, probably the same is true in various sciences.