@halcyonheather Our federal EFC is absolutely a joke and in no way something we can actually afford to pay unless we want to stop saving for retirement and/or default on med school loans (hell no in both cases). Also, many private colleges (and I assume this is the case at the ‘tippy tops’) have their own secret institutional formulae for determining what THEY think our family contribution “should” be which may or may not have anything to do with what we could actually pay. Often there is a very large gap in what schools say we can pay and what we can ACTUALLY pay.