Mietze's advice is great, especially the part about doing your gen-ed work at a community college. It's cheaper and more reliable, and frankly, only the classes you need for your major really need to come from your main university, and only then because they have residency requirements most of the time which require you to take X number of your major classes there in order for them to award you the degree.
Me, I decided to take a riskier route. I've always had a passion for law, and wanted to be an attorney, but the kind of attorney I want to be (Civil Rights/Civil Liberties) is absolutely not where any sort of realistic money is at. But about halfway through my polisci degree, I had a realization. As much as I'd love to practice that sort of law in any meaningful way, what I'd really like to do more than that is teach.
Except, law professors are some of the most competitive fields in the nation, especially given that lawyers are now less in demand than they were.
So now I have to take a gamble. Get my BA in PoliSci, and apply to law school at one of the satellite universities that I'm attending, wherein I will pursue a joint J.D/Ph.D program in Law and Political Science, and then spend the next two years in a Civil Rights/Civil Liberties LL.M. program followed by a Jurisprudence LL.M.
Why? Because it'll distinguish me from other candidates, and give me a fuckton of publications under my belt that show I'm a serious academic as well as a competent attorney. Which is what law schools are looking for when they go to hire professors, who make a surprisingly decent salary. But that's assuming that I stay on top of my shit the whole way (much easier, admittedly, since i'm not 18 and I know damn good and well what lies down this road).
But with the Ph.D in my pocket, if all else fails, I can fall back to teaching PoliSci, which is the next best thing, or possibly go into politics myself.
So really, anything you wanna do that's less risky than -that-? I'd say go for. Especially if you find something you're really passionate about.