IMO there's too much backlash against college degrees. Two thoughts - If you're going to school for pottery, yes you're most likely wasting your time. You have to be goal oriented enough to learn skills that actually matter. Even if I have an english lit degree, the skills to pull out of that are writing, communication, critical skills thinking, problem solving etc. Absolutely not things you can't pick up other places, but things you do have to work and practice at. it also matters what you are interested in - eg. in parallel to that degree i did nerd shit and ive worked in IT my entire career now and I dont regret a thing - i can communicate to my business properly enough that ill talk to anyone about anything, no worries. and then actually do what i was talking about in a technical sense.
The other thought is that you have to seperate undergrad and grad school. Undergrad - you can go to community college or literally anywhere if you're getting a general humanities degree. for STEM, it matters more because of the depth of learning - if you have never taken accounting 101 or econ 101, thats a big difference if your parents also never exposed you to that, for example. School theatrically helps fill in the gaps. Definitely not for everyone. Then grad school is for when you actually have realigned your head to be more focused. You need that extra learning to - become a doctor. Become a lawyer. get an mba or a research PHD etc. There is a huge merit to getting properly educated AND learning how to keep on educating yourself. not everyone needs university to get to that point - but a lot of people benefit. i have friends just as happy being high level mechanics and plumbers as i do friends who are network admins or directors at big companies. its your life.
marriage finances are a whole separate thing that i also think are important / highly individualized. your money. do what you want with it. but in my fam, we share with logic. so we do have entirely separated accounts and we each pay for whatever makes sense. its been good to us for years and i dont see that changing. but would absolutely share without hesitation if she wanted to. we just never saw the need.
for school, we are taking on some big loans as neither of us have hundreds of thousands of dollars saved up to spend in the span of two years. but its an mba and im sure she'll be able to maximize her time @ a top ten school. if she was just going for the letters and paper, then no thats absolutely not worth it unless she was working for a corp who was willing to immediately cash it in - aka promotion upon grad. part of the value of these things is the forced network youre buying into which can help level up your networking at a time of life that it naturally shrinks like crazy. if youre married without kids, your social circle is probably not expanding that much unless youre very hyper about meeting new people and doing new things. its not like when youre a kid and everything is new so you're always meeting new people.
sorry - wall of text/im tired of using proper cap/punctuation.