Verified answer

Eh.. personally, the college. I'd rather have a nice career (with which I could use my assumed decent wages to pay back the debt) and a decent education rather than risk it in the High School Diploma job market. Pretty fierce in there.

But who says you have to go to Stanford or Northwestern? Isn't there a nice state university, well known, in your area you can go to?

For Stanford, I'd take debt. Not so much for Northwestern- mainly because UW Madison is a great state school (if you lived in a state with crappy state schools- then I may consider Northwestern).

But to better answer you question- I'd also need to know how MUCH debt are we talking about. If you're going to end up with $100k more debt going to Stanford then UW Madison- then OF COURSE go to UW Madison.