I love this whole discussion. We are at the end of this stressful process and when I look back, I’m not sure if we would have done anything differently, although I feel very nervous about our D’s final choices. We are from Illinois and she wants very much to major in biomedical engineering. She is an excellent student with high test scores. She is also a competitive ice skater so she centered her search around top biomed programs with skating teams, with a few safeties sprinkled in just in case the merit didn’t work out. We told her to go ahead and reach for the big schools, but have some realistic back ups. But now that we are at the end, her realistic back ups are either super far away (U of Delaware), or not as strong in engineering (U of Iowa). Even our in state U of Illinois ended up being super expensive since she received no merit there. U Delaware seems like a great fit and the price is really right, but that’s a big risk moving to the other side of the country. It’s the last school we are going to tour so we shall see. We are also waiting on 2 more financial packages and crossing our fingers she gets some more scholarhips. If not, she’ll have to decide what trade offs she’s willing to part with - skating, distance from home, student loans, quality of major program, etc. I almost wish she wanted a different major because I think her options would have been wider, but I"ve never seen her more passionate about anything in her life.