One thing that sounds counter-intuitive but really did help us afford college was the fact that we’d been paying private school tuition for years. We weren’t able to save very aggressively, but we had big old tuition-shaped holes ripped in our household budget already and didn’t have to change much to afford a basic state school. On the other hand we really didn’t have a lot of room to move when a more expensive school came up, so with four kids we were pretty clear about budgets at the start of the process. One went to a more expensive LAC, but she got the merit and it fit for us.
But back to the earlier ideas, this is a big change that happened years ago. Suddenly finding $15k or $30k or more is not feasible for most people.