<p>OP- I sympathize. I know many faculty kids and they end up in sort of a financial and admission’s no-man’s land.</p>
<p>You need to do a little more research on how financial aid works in order to intelligently approach your application strategy. You are unlikely to see a tremendous amount of variability in the aid package you get from your target schools (i.e. need only.) The amount of loan component may vary-- but none of these schools are going to give you the “free tuition” deal at Lehigh.</p>
<p>In order to get some of the very lush merit aid packages you need to drop down a notch in selectivity and look for places where your ethnicity and scores and geography are unusual and highly desired. Those places all exist so you need to go find out where they are.</p>
<p>For sure this process is not all about the money. But I do know many faculty kids who end up disappointed come April-- mainly because they assume that if the choice is Columbia/Barnard or Dad’s employer, they think that their financial aid from Columbia/Barnard will compete favorably with Dad’s employer, or at least be manageable for their parents, and then the EFC is just not workable. And the default option is sub-optimal.</p>
<p>So if you’re going to apply this Fall, you need to have a candid conversation with your parents. Do not assure them that you will for sure be getting “a lot of aid”. You won’t know that until you run the estimators (which are only estimators.) Do not assume that the colleges will “work with you” if their grant is too low for you. Barring a change in circumstances (parent losing a job, sibling critically ill requiring lots of out of pocket medical expenses) they won’t “work with you” too much beyond the facts of their calculation. And do not assume that the well publicized outside scholarships will be falling in your lap-- and in some cases at the schools you’ve listed, every dollar of outside merit aid will just get deducted from your institutional aid, i.e. it helps the school but it won’t help you a nickel.</p>
<p>So go do some homework. Lehigh is a great fall back; you can probably find lots of other schools which will excite you.</p>
<p>If you were my D I’d advise you to focus on two of your EC’s, dump the rest. It’s great to keep busy, but you don’t want to come off as a serial joiner.</p>