Other users have given you excellent advice, including “Bloom where you’re planted.” To answer the question you posed in your title, assuming you can take on the debt, however:
What’s worse: no freedom or crippling debt? Neither, because crippling debt = no freedom. They are one and the same. The only difference is that your definition of “no freedom” lasts for 4 years, while “crippling debt” and the lack of freedom that it brings can last a lifetime.