For fun, run Harvard’s NPC. Depending on how low your income is and how much you have in unprotected non home equity assets, you can still get FA with about 1M in investment assets. I asked on a thread last week about home equity. For many full needs schools that do not count or cap home equity you could have almost unlimited home equity and it theoretically would not count.
I was very curious if there were real life situations since the intent was if you bought the house a while ago and the home equity jumped. As opposed to you inherited a bunch of money and decided to buy the biggest house you can find. Seems either situation is fine for FA. If I was working in FA I would look much more closely at the second situation.