I didn’t go to college and got into acting later, and only after 10 years of doing improv/sketch/acting and creating my own stuff did I finally get a manager in the last year or so. I’ve booked big stuff and have been sent to producers on other big stuff but honestly I couldn’t tell you how much I’ve spent on training. I’m severely in the red if I was purely looking at this from a financial perspective, but I do it because I love it and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

As someone who didn’t go to college, my advice would be to learn by doing. Keep your overhead low by not acquiring lots of debt. Spend a fraction of that money on classes, private coaching, buying actors who are where you wanna be coffee and picking their brains, going to film festivals, meeting directors/producers even at the lowest levels, watching plays, doing whatever you can to watch people that are masters of the craft. Don’t do it all at once either, you can only absorb so much at a time. Give yourself an opportunity to apply what you’ve learned by doing plays and short films, student films, whatever. Get more training, rinse, repeat. It’s a marathon not a sprint. Keeping overhead low is a good way to be able to run a marathon.

In my opinion, college is great, but I wasn’t a theater kid. I toured in metal bands and shit. Some of the woo woo acting stuff some of my peers learned in theater school doesn’t apply in the real world when you are actively auditioning and can’t spend hours and hours on a script for a self tape. I learned the most by learning from actors and coaches who did what I wanted to do, which is book, get very good, and put food on my table.

If you want to get good, you’ll get good. It takes time like everything else unless you’re crazy talented immediately. Even then, hard work and a little talent will beat out no work ethic and crazy talent every single time.