It can be done but it requires work, planning and sacrifice. A student named Jessica Slizewski did it and wrote about her experience. Her article was published at Time.

I Don’t Have Student Loans and I Don’t Feel Bad for People Who Do

My father is not a Wall Street banker. I’m not a member of the so-called “1 percent.” My mother isn’t an heiress and I’m not some genius who earned a full scholarship to the institution of my choice.

Yet somehow, by what most of my friends think was the wave of some fairy godmother’s wand, I graduated college without student loans.

Stats from the Department of Education show outstanding student loans total more than $1 trillion. A report from The Institute for College Access in late 2013 revealed the average new graduate starts his or her life with $29,400 in student loan debt. College as we know it is clearly unaffordable.

So my question is: Why do people keep embarking on the “traditional college experience” when they know it’s going to put them tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars in debt?

And while some people say these 18-year-old kids don’t know what they’re getting themselves into, let’s not pretend we don’t know better. I distinctly remember asking my friend how he would pay off the roughly $70,000 debt he would incur to obtain a major in Ancient Greek and Latin at a liberal arts college in the Midwest. His answer? A simple shrug and flippant “It’s not something I have to worry about right now — hopefully they’ll be forgiven by the government.” Now that he’s still waiting tables four years after graduation, I’d say it’s well past time to start worrying.

I can’t pretend I completely understand how these people feel after the fun is over and the repayments begin, but I can say that I really don’t feel bad for them.

Why not? Because I worked hard to avoid taking out loans.