I felt this was more common in elementary and middle school, but since high school and well I to college I barely every find myself writing the date on papers. But yeah, I hated reworking the muscle memory for the first couple weeks of the year.

Yeah student debt is no joke. I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I could commute and had enough student aid and scholarship to go debt free first 2 years and use savings from working part time to pay next 2 years off in (less than 6k each year). But I wish more companies would invest in proper training than push that on students and college to do (poorly imo).