<p>Ripemango, have you tried some of the EFC calculators on college websites? I believe Princeton has one that might give you an idea of what you could expect from HYPS (who have similar FA policies, I think). One thing to note is that the number of siblings attending college at the same time has a large influence. So your EFC with an annual income of $125K, cash assets of $400K and $400K equity in your family home might be, say, $60K (I’m just guessing - run the estimator if you want the real number) but once you have a sibling in college, your parents expected contribution for you would likely be halved. At that point, you would be getting about $23K in grants, which would make the cost of those years of your college career similar to the tuition+room+board that you might be paying at a state school, or at a private school that includes loans in it’s FA packages.</p>
<p>Anyways, there isn’t a clear-cut absolute answer. Financial aid at HYPS, even with $400K residential equity, $400K assets and $125K income, might make one of those schools affordable for you if/when you have siblings in college.</p>
<p>Moving the money back to a foreign country: - there are many possibilities here. Moving it to an account owned by your parents would mean that they are required to report it both on IRS forms and on CSS/Profile, every year as long as they own it. Giving it to your grandparents - could this be structured as repayment of a loan? If your grandparents’ country is Israel, there are definitely tax advisors and accountants who deal with financial issues of US-based immigrants, yordim and hozrim who would be able to tell you what is legal. A talk with one of them is worth a lot more than us shooting the breeze here on CC.</p>
<p>If your parents don’t feel able to commit $53K/year for one child’s education…how set are they in this opinion? How much do they think they can afford? What sort of school do they think they want you to attend? They may have unrealistic ideas of what’s available. On the other hand, there certainly are schools where kids with superior stats and applications can get merit awards. I assume by now you’ve started researching some of those. Plenty of smart middle-class kids in this country compromise on the school they attend because of merit awards. I know a kid at Duke who turned down Princeton, a kid at Clark who turned down Brandeis, a kid at Muhlenberg who turned down Brandeis, a kid at U of Rochester who turned down Cornell, a number of kids at McGill who turned down more prestigious and more expensive schools, kids at UM-CP, UConn, Binghampton and Geneseo who had more prestigious but more costly options that they turned down. Then there are good-but-not-famously-fantastic LACs that sometimes award great merit scholarships,…anyways, lots of places to investigate and to apply to.</p>