I strongly dislike parents who do this because the goal post of what makes a college “good enough” seems to keep changing. It also implies affordable options are not “good schools.”
Look at the actual tuition costs directly from the college website. Right down tuition plus room and board (dorm and meal plan) cost. Assume you will get 0 scholarships.
Are your parents able to pay $80k/yr in tuition without loans? Or are they willing to force you into $320,000 of debt for a bachelor’s degree?
That means they have almost 7k a month of income that is not needed for other bills.
No, it doesn’t necessarily mean that. They could have had the foresight (and means) to set aside something each month for the past 15 years, adding annual monetary gifts from relatives, possible watching it grow in a tax-deferred 529.
(That is entirely feasible. That’s how my daughter afforded her years at Barnard, and is now still going to pay through at least her 4th year of grad school.)
I often cringe on this site, when I see kids asking questions being interrogated relentlessly for the scenario they present, or having rhetorical questions thrown at them.
I do understand your sentiment.
Sometimes parents might dangle the “free college if you do well” in front of kids entering high school, hoping just to give them extra motivation to simply do their best - not because they literally would ultimately refuse to pay for whatever colleges that actually will offer acceptances 4 years later.
And many of us know all too well that kids who don’t know to ask the right questions about budget can fall in love with a dream school that isn’t financially doable and then feel really let down and completely emotionally fall apart and feeling like failures.
I very much do not agree with that approach at all. I would rather tell my kids “I have xyz amount for college” and have honest discussions about cost of different schools and how merit is chosen based on GPA and test scores etc. Kids are literally becoming increasing anxious and suicidal trying to get into “top schools” as rated by certain ranking systems. I think its cruel to push your kids to get into only highly selective schools with low acceptance rates that are also super expensive and may be out of budget. Pushing your kid to strive for the “best” and then moving the goal post and/or taking away the ball completely just seems unfair.
OP is best served by knowing a budget and finding schools that are affordable and being open to learning about schools that have higher than a 50% acceptance rate.
Adding to perhaps look at U Minn Twin Cities, Central Michigan, Ball State, Butler.
Wesleyan University is one of the few LACs with an actual astrophysics track within its Physics major. Therefore, you have the option of using your B.A. as a terminal degree or using it as a stepping stone for graduate study in Astrophysics: https://www.wesleyan.edu/physics/Tracks/astrophysics.html
Its 100 year old observatory (used mostly as a teaching tool) is kind of fun, too:
