Pre warning this will be long winded, but might be quite helpful. skip to the end if you just want the advice
I knew what I wanted when I got out of high school, I was going to be a mechanic, and that's what I did. I started as an apprentice in late 07, sweeping floors and gleaning every bit I could from everyone around me. I was a fast learner and a hard worker, and in 5 years I went from sweeping floors to lead tech with an apprentice of my own, a year and some after I was running that shop. It was everything I had set out to do when I left high school, I had accomplished almost every goal 17 year old me had set for myself. I had done in 6 years what I thought was going to take me 10. It felt great, for awhile.... but soon it was just a job, I didn't have any thing to strive for anymore. Worse yet, I had been so focused getting to what I "wanted", I had never stopped to reevaluate what it was I actually wanted, but I made decent money, and I was good at what I did. The years kept passing, and I just kept doing my job, but little by little, I started to hate it. You will often hear guidance counselors say something like "Do what your passionate about", in my experience that's the fastest way to hate the thing you love to do.
I knew I had a problem, I knew I needed to do something, so what did I do? I did what every guy does, I buried it. I said it was a rough patch and I just need to work harder, and I piled on more work. Made the owner happy, his profits doubled over the next two years, made me worse. The one thing I had always loved, was now the thing I hated most, and then it happened. The best and worse thing that has ever happened to me, I tripped over an air hose, caught myself wrong, and tore apart my right knee. After the surgery, they said I couldn't go back to work for at least a month, and needed 6 months of pt. At that point the longest I had taken off work in the last 4 years was a week, I had to stay off my feet for twice that. Now with nothing to bury my unfulfilled feelings, I had to face them, I had no choice but to come to grips with the fact that "Everything I ever wanted" was not actually what I wanted. I didn't know what I was going to do, but I knew what I couldn't do anymore. I made it a week and a half after I came back before I gave my notice.
I couldn't bury it anymore, I couldn't do it anymore, the owner offered me more money, turned it down. I got several job offers from shops in the area, all for more than I was making, one for 30k more than I was making, didn't matter. There is almost no sum of money that is worth hating your life for 10 hours a day, that's not living, that surviving.
I let in to everything that scared me (that I might hate the only thing I've loved doing since I was 11, and I wasted 10 years on a career that I hate ). I dug into why I loved working on cars in the first place, and what it was that I actually liked doing, and when you boiled everything else off, the answer was I love the why and how anything works, and how to make it better. That points directly to engineering.
I'm still pursuing my degree in mechanical engineering now, and while its hard (seriously, its hard!) I love every minuet of it, and my only regret is that I didn't reevaluate sooner. I don't regret my former career (for the most part), the lessons there cant be taught in a classroom, and has actually given me a leg up on many of my peers. just don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy.
So this is my advise for you, I've had several apprentices just like you, and what you need to worry about right now is not what you should go to college for, but rather what do you really like to do? Try to put together all the things that you really enjoy in life, and try and find a common thread between them. If you can find a common thread in everything you love, follow that! That is likely the underling drive for everything your passionate about. If you can identify it, Great go get a job! doesn't matter what it is, as long as it is tangential to that thread. Don't worry about school yet, fafsa not going anywhere. If you like that job, Great do it for a year. If you don't like that job, Great quit, cross it off the list of thing you think you'll like.
Now, before say "but I need a degree for that job", there is Always a job tangential to the job that needs a degree, that you don't need a degree for. The whole point here is to not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, and years of your life to end up in something you don't like doing. You wouldn't buy a car without test driving it, so why would you buy a life without a test drive?
The number of apprentices I had that spent 30k and two years at tech school, just to find out that its not how tv makes it look, and quit within a year, was sickening, Don't be in that group.
Find something you love, try it on, and if you need to go to school to get the job you really want, do it. If you already have a job in a company that has the job you want, you will most likely have a job as soon as your out of school. If you find a job in the trades, and you love it, great! Don't be ashamed of it, it doesn't make you a second class citizen, and it doesn't mean you were to dumb to go to college. If anything, you'll be laughing your way to the bank when your friends with four year degrees are making 50k with 100k in debt, and your making 80k and just bought a house. In the end, don't worry about the money, if you work hard and are good at what you do, you'll make good money, or at the very least enough money. Worry about how you want to spend every day of your life, and never be afraid to change your mind.
