You have to start thinking outside of the box. The schools listed get a ton of applicants like your daughter. In order to get merit aid your daughter needs to stand out above and beyond the other applicants. Look outside of the northeast. Look in the bottom half of the top 100 schools. Go to their financial aid pages and look at how their merit aid works. Know that many other families are in the same boat. Get that UMass app in early and have your kid know that may be the smartest choice for her. The other consideration is finding ways to make more cash available by cutting back on your overall family budget.
I’m thinking you should not be ruling out any affordable option (which has other appealing elements) because there is no program labeled neuroscience. Your D may end up going a different route- epidemiology, for example- for which an undergrad degree in applied math with a bio minor is probably more useful than something labeled neuroscience. Or biostatistics- very hot right now. Any application of mathematical analysis or “Big Data” is a huge wave roiling through cancer research, brain sciences, disease identification and management, clinical trial research, etc.
So to screen via neuro is much too narrow. And if it’s the “helping kids in the community” she could to any of the allied health fields- physician’s assistant, OT, PT, genetic counseling, etc. And a psych major in some universities is very quant oriented, with a lot of “heavy lifting” in statistics, chemistry and brain science, oriented towards research, whereas at others it is very light on the quant and very heavy on behavioral observation with an eye towards the helping professions
I think a more robust approach would be to identify how much you can pay out of pocket, what her geographic considerations are, does she prefer urban, suburban, etc., how heavily the hassle factor of travel will be (i.e. it’s probably easier and cheaper to go from Southwest or Jet Blue hub to another Southwest/Jet Blue airport than it is to drive 12 hours each way for drop off and pick up), and any other preferences (dance opportunities open to non-dance majors?). Then look at each of the options to tease out if there are enough life sciences/research type courses and opportunities to build the kind of academic program she wants.
What are the personal criteria for choosing the college? What is the major, future plans, like Grad. school? Or you blankly going to match the stats with the school? People choose schools based on completely different personal criteria lists each of the criteria also carry a different weight.