Our EFC was unaffordable, and we had no college savings. What we could afford was the local community college. We told our kid that her options were the community college or any place she could get an aid package that brought our costs down to the price of the community college. She wasn’t interested in digging for affordable 4-year places and opted for the CC and a guaranteed transfer to a state U.
Crunch your numbers. Can you set aside anything at all each month? Try doing that. Whatever you can peel off and stash in some kind of savings (even if it is in a shoebox under your bed) will be money you can have available for college costs. Start on January 1, and you might be able to have a semester of community college costs saved before a bill comes for the fall. That’s how we worked things.