I had a fancy residential four-year education back in the stone age. I know what that kind of opportunity can mean for a student, and I was deeply saddened that I couldn’t offer my own kid that experience.
The only thing different between you and your daughter, and me and my daughter, is that I accepted the financial situation when she was in 10th grade, and I had time to get my head straight before she got excited about looking at colleges. You now have your head pretty straight. Talk with your daughter about paying for her education. Get her to look at the numbers with you. Set a new standard for affordability. Wait until all of the aid packages are on the table. Then go through them and hold them against the affordability standard. If the money is good enough, she has a college to go to. If it isn’t, she can take that gap year, do a lot of school volunteer work to firm up her career goal, and think very carefully about her new application list for fall 2019.