Will they also make the loan payments?
Your own success in journalism so far is a hint as to why it is so hard to make money as a journalist: there are lots of high quality free sources of information out there. When you do the debt repayment calculators @Mwfan1921 noted, put those repayments against a salary of $22-$30K (pre-tax), which is roughly where journalism salaries start.
2 years of community college, living at home, and transferring to UT-A could let you graduate with a degree from UT debt free.