A few thoughts from me:
I really, really wish I was a professional pilot. It's all I wanted to be when growing up. But money etc, and people also told me I should go to university "just in case".
I
did go to university, which saddled me with enough debt to ensure I couldn't then do flight training in any sort of reasonable timeframe to make it my job. There was a slight - ahem - loss of focus in my early/mid 20s too
The irony is my degree was mostly pointless for my current (IT-related) profession, which I sort of fell into via a completely different route. Not
totally pointless mind, but that's just because I work in the public sector which has a ridiculous and unjustified intellectual snobbery about degrees - you want to make the interview shortlist, you need one.
Unlike university, a flying career is a bit time-limited. You're better starting at 16 than 26, and certainly 36 which is when I did my postgrad. So if I had my time again I'd be looking at how I could get the money to invest in flying first. And maybe that includes going into debt like most students. You can always go to uni later if you need to - and indeed people who go later tend to study better, in my experience, because they have a genuine reason to be there rather than just thinking of it as an extension of school.
The great thing about IT as a career is that you don't need any formal qualifications! Sure they help, and for some jobs you do. But there's a ton of stuff out there where enthusiasm, aptitude and practical experience are more than enough to get you good jobs. Some (not all) of the best people I've worked with never went to university, but they had experience and aptitude in spades. Conversely one of the biggest liabilities had a degree from Cambridge. So again if I had my time again I'd probably make IT the Plan B - make sure you're employable but don't put down too much money, at least at first. Practical technical fields such as system administration, networking, or programming are good ones to aim for where you can get decent jobs without needing a degree. Management and business-focused fields a bit less so.
I wouldn't necessarily advocate the pay-a-ton-of-money-to-get-an-Airbus-FO-post "academy" approach (and I know some people who think it's downright ridiculous) but it is an option, and there's a great blog by a young guy who's going through the process at the moment. He also talks about his Plan B, the reasons he decided to go the way he did etc so it's well worth a read:
https://www.pilotgeorge.co.uk/What do I do now to get my aviation fix? I fly microlights as a hobby. So my final thought: don't discount the lighter end of aviation if you don't end up working in the industry but still want to fly. You get a lot of hours and fun for your buck with microlighting.