Unless something has changed in the past decade, you can still make payments to your loans, you just defer the requirement to do so until 6 months after graduation.

As someone else here said, if you would pay money to a loan while in college, it’d be better to put into a high yield account of some sort to hold onto until after college. From there I would get advice from a finance counselor on what to do with that money, whether save for longer or start it into payments.