If you let your roof leak so you could pay for college, you graduated, and you eventually fixed the roof, that's strictly worse than fixing the roof immediately

If you let your roof leak so you could pay for college, you graduated, and you eventually fixed the roof, that's strictly worse than fixing the roof immediately and getting a loan instead, graduating, and having your loans forgiven. The person who scrimped and saved had a leaky roof for many years and the person who took out a loan didn't. (And leaky roofs are just a metonym. College is pretty expensive, and paying for it drastically reduces most people's quality of life in a way that's much bigger than leaky roofs, and much harder to shrug off.)