You are talking $32K, worst case, TOTAL for all 4 years, right?
Being debt free, is ideal, but the general rule of thumb is don’t take more than one years salary in leverage.
SDSU isn’t without cost. An 80 mile per day RT commute is going to have a mental cost. In pure dollars though, using 180 schools days per year and AAA average cost per mile, you’ll have $9200/year in automotive expenses.
According to College Scorecard which harvests data from students that had Federal subsidy in the forms of grants or loans, the median salary for a BA degree at SDSU is $42K. It’s $64K at CP. Those aren’t skewed by tiny sample size (1521 SDSU and 605 CP) or self reporting.
I don’t think this is as easy as saying just go debt free.
NOTE: My son is a CP grad, so I might be seen as biased. I certainly like the school…a lot. I do this analysis all the time though. It just so happens that this time it happened to be his alma mater.