Oh honey.
Your dreams are bigger than your budget, and your goals are still forming. Taking on debt without a clear plan is never a good strategy. Taking on debt when you have a superb alternative is an actively bad plan.
I don’t know what rankings you are referring to, as Skidmore is not typically ranked in the same groupings as the UCs (LAC v National University), but from a prestige perspective, Skidmore is not lower than UC-I or UC-D.
If you have your heart set on California, and that is the perspective you took with you to Skidmore, then I would expect that you would have seen every possible negative and dismissed every possible positive. Being brutally honest with yourself: did you really give it a fair chance?
Anyway, if your only 3 choices at this point are 2 that you cannot afford and 1 one that you do not like, then your best options are:
- community college for 2 years and then apply to transfer to a school that suits your needs at that time;
- a gap year or
- checking out the clearing house to see who still has openings for this autumn that you can afford (though you will almost certainly trading down).