<p>I would add Wash U to the list.</p>
<p>I agree with the merit aid additions and would also suggest Bard & Johns Hopkins be considered.</p>
<p>bulb-- you want reach match & safeties both for admission AND for $$$.</p>
<p>By shooting a bit lower on the list your D's SATs would probably get lots of merit aid at high quality schools.</p>
<p>Thank you everybody. Now I have understand a lot.
We will consider some other schools you adviced.
I have one more question.
How to determine your current home value when you fill the CSS form?
My neighbor sold their house(similar to ours) for $700K last month.
Is that our home value?</p>
<p>I would suggest you take the average of the last couple of nearby sales, then deduct any expenses of sale-- commmission 6%, title & escrow fees (about $4,000?), termite repairs & tenting ($3000) -- whatever you'd normally have to spend to spruce up & sell your home.</p>
<p>You can use these calculators:</p>
<p>Federal Housing Index Calculator:
<a href="http://finaid.org/calculators/federalhousing.phtml%5B/url%5D">http://finaid.org/calculators/federalhousing.phtml</a></p>
<p>Note: this one yields a "minimum derived value" which can be unrealistically low --I would not recommend relying on this if it was very far off from what the next two calculators show.</p>
<p>Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Calculator:
<a href="http://www.ofheo.gov/Landing.asp%5B/url%5D">http://www.ofheo.gov/Landing.asp</a></p>
<p>RealtyTrac (Market Analysis)
<a href="http://www.realtytrac.com/pub/landing_houseworth.asp%5B/url%5D">http://www.realtytrac.com/pub/landing_houseworth.asp</a></p>
<p>I think you can safely assume that the financial aid departments have access to the same calculators.</p>
<p>Speaking as a knowledgeable realtor, I just got a value of $315,000 from the first link, which is quite low. From the last link, I got a value of over $1 million, which is laughable. Didn't try the middle one; looked too complicated.</p>
<p>So, I don't know how useful these are. The low value is closer, but still at least $100,000 off the mark. SBMom's approach is the "real" way to value your home (she is, I believe, also a realtor :) ), but I don't know if it's the best "college financial aid" way.</p>
<p>Actually, the OFHEO is probably the one that the colleges are most likely to be using - I assume that financial aid offices will double check valuations if they seem unreasonably low in relation to median values for the area. So I guess one thing to add into the mix is to find out median value for your zip code - that's going to tell you whether a stated value is going to set off alarms in the financial aid office.</p>
<p>The Realtytrac one is going to be high, because it is a calculation done by very optimistic realtors; whereas for financial aid we want a very conservative assessment. I have had my home appraised in the past year and the OFHEO calculation came in about $20K under the appraisal - despite the hassle of downloading their software, I think its a worthwhile calculation to run.</p>