Perhaps target meet need universities that give you the best financial aid package-it means running a lot of NPCs but it’ll beat having to work a lot of hours in college.
Compare Northeastern, Boston College, Tufts, and Hamilton (they use wildly different formulas - BC in the way it handles equity, for instance.) Is one more affordable? Is BC an outlier (if not, that’s information).
I, too, hate the derisive term “try-hard”. Excellence is never reached effortlessly.