College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

true in principle, and I don't totally disagree. but I have two counter-counter arguments.

first, at least in my experience, is that humanities focus a lot on the procedural elements of writing Scholarly Papers. you do learn about constructing good arguments and writing style to an extent. but a lot of time is spent on those highly specialized bits that don't really matter outside of academia.

second, writing is often required in stem majors too! the volume of writing was definitely less than in humanities courses, but I wrote lots of reports and documentation for my CS major. some of that was very contrived, but I don't feel it was less helpful than writing a million english or history papers.

It was mid-2000s, I lucked out and graduated and got a job just prior to the great recession and for a few reasons this was a huge boost for me as I had a limited number of inbound new hires to compete with for the first ~5 years. People would pay a premium for my "2 years experience" instead of hire new grads.

Tuition has risen about the same as the pay for the job I worked in college. I will admit it was a decent job as "un-degreed college job" goes. It was a job that several folks were making a career of (~$15-20/hour in mid-2000s). This job was in a 24/7 hospital environment so I was able to work whenever I wanted and usually worked 12 hour shifts on TTS and stacked my classes on MWF. I'd do homework afterwards and on Sundays I had no class or school. The biggest "regret" of doing it this way is the social experience I had is not as fun as most. Although, I was very self aware of that and the regimen actually helped me stay focused. I partied a lot in high school and nearly dropped out and in the end had to cram 4 years of classes in 1 semester + a summer. I did the self paced "alternative school" thing where you read the textbook and take proctored tests to pass the course. I loved that method as I always felt taking 1 or 2 semester to cover a single text book in 1 hour a day was a horrible approach to [my style of] learning. [I also taught myself to code around this time, built a lot of side projects, and realized my learning style is well suited for that, I can just read the docs - I don't need to take a class.]

If I was doing the same now, I think the biggest challenge would be affording housing. I paid about $400-500/month for a 1/1 in Austin back then. One year I had a roommate but even split the rent still worked out about the same, and we got a newer nicer 2/2 apartment. COL in Texas was much lower then, especially the major cities.

I'll admit, I don't watch the college town apartment cost trends.

I suspect this is a bias on your part. It's certainly been my experience that people into the humanities are curious about different things than STEM types; some people have no inclination towards building things, or learning about quantum mechanics, or solving problems in complex analysis. But they might be able to talk your ear off about Edith Wharton or Nazi themes to be found in Heidegger's Being and Time.

At least where I went to school people studying the humanities were not appreciably less curious or more "here because I have to be" than engineers.