I may be beating a dead horse here, and am late to the party, but outside of UT I am not sure how you are going to afford most of her list.
Your EFC alone is 41k. If she is applying to FAFSA only schools, it will stay that way as they only care about your income. But 41k isn’t affordable AND schools do not guarantee to make up the difference even if they are FAFSA only, unless they say they are a 100% meet needs school. The problem is, most schools in that category are not FAFSA only, they want the CSS PROFILE.
Schools that use CSS PROFILE care what dad makes and is most of your list. Doesn’t matter that he will contribute $0, the schools will determine what he can pay and will expect him to regardless of whether he will or not. If he makes anything, your EFC will be greater than 41K. If either of you have real estate, retirement savings, other investments, those will count as well. You could well be looking at full price at any college in the country. And that’s true with 3 kids and a sick mom. Unless the dad has all 3 kids in college at the same time as your D (which would help) it’s not going to matter a whole lot. Trust me on that one, we certainly can’t afford our EFC either but the formulas are what they are. it wasn’t fun to learn but it definitely changed our application strategy for all 4 of our kids.
The ONLY way you will reduce your cost is to find schools where your D is either in state or is a candidate for merit monies. Most of your list does not offer merit scholarships. OR they are very competitive. To be competitive for those scholarships your D needs to be in the top 75th percent. Not just admissible and a good candidate, but a top top candidate. Which, as compelling as she is (and she is), she isn’t going to be at a lot of the schools on your list.
I really implore you to look VERY closely at each of your schools’ websites and their common data sets to understand the chance of merit aid at every single one (if they even offer it). I would also consider the fact that she doesn’t have much of a relationship with dad now (and his 3 other kids?) but you are considering leveraging that for an instate advantage. That means all mail, etc, everything goes there. She will have to be there to some degree. Is that something she is really comfortable with? If you drop down a notch and get over the “prestige” factor that you seem to be chasing there are a ton of really really good schools that will give your D merit, or publics that have honors colleges and will give her merit. Right now it looks like you have 3 likely financial options Bing, UT and Howard.
It’s 11/17. Where has she applied to date? Did she apply ED to Bowdoin? I don’t see how that is going to be an affordable option as there is zero merit aid offered, which will mean heartbreak if she gets in and you can’t afford it. I’ll be honest, your list scares me to death. This seems to be the list pre 11/15, you’ve had a ton of feedback here, I think folks would appreciate it if you updated as you may find yourself needing to look at RD rounds for affordable schools that are a notch down but will compete to have your D, versus your D competing just for a seat at the table.
- Amherst
- Bates
- Bowdoin
- Barnard
- Brown
- Carnegie Mellon
- Dartmouth
- Duke
- Harvard
- Howard
- NYU
- SUNY Binghamton
- Rice
- Tufts
- UT Austin
- Vassar
Good luck!