Thanks 
I’ll do that. I have a very bad idea about the finances for college so I appreciate the understanding 
I think they no longer ask.
Common app still asks, but IME colleges don’t let app readers see the answer. Colleges still have to track this data and report it to IPEDS each year. Here are the questions:
Learning about college costs and financial aid is important, just consider it part of your college education. You and your parents can ask questions here, and there is some helpful info in the Paying for College forum:
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Thank you, my kids had all applied to colleges before the change.
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Located approximately 250 miles away from Missouri. Iowa offers merit-based & need-based university & departmental scholarships to both in-state & OOS admits. A 1300 SAT composite would make you more competitive for aid.
U Iowa will not get close to $10K all in for OP. OOS direct COA is around $50K, max merit $15K which is quite competitive. Institutional need based aid is very unlikely for OOS students.
I would not recommend an application, there is no reason for OP to collect unaffordable acceptances.
It’s really difficult to make school suggestions for OP until we have the NPC results. Outside of community college, I’m still not sure which school on OP’s list is highly likely for admission and is also affordable.
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So look at your list - and each has a net price calculator. Have your folks run it - and it will give them an approximation.
I would focus on schools with your best admission chance - like a Rhodes, Muhlenberg and DePauw. Have them fill out the NPC. If they can’t afford it, if it’s going to cause them loans that are beyond the federally guaranteed, you should move on.
I put DePauw below but each school has one of these NPCs. You can find it via web search or on their financial aid page. The reality is that a college education is out of touch for some. It’s awesome to achieve but you also don’t want to wreck your family financially. So you all need to have a serious discussion related to this.
Good luck.
There was a poster many years ago who claimed, in his words, to be “dirt poor” and did manage to get a lot of need based aid for one of his kids. But in reality he had much of his money with family overseas, and, IIRC, had deferred income so “looked” low income for the first child. IIRC they paid a lot for the second child’s college. So it is possible that both “we can pay only $10,000” and “don’t worry about the money” could both be true.
Also perfectly plausible!
Logically speaking yes, but … even if I couldn’t afford to go to my dream college, I’d pay fifty bucks to know I got in.
Wouldn’t it be really great if there was a website where a student & their family entered financial info and it spat out a list of colleges they can afford? Anonymously, of course.
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I’m not necessarily advocating for this website, but Niche will let you do this to at least get an early indication of where you might want to dig further. Once you start to get a list, you can run your own NPCs to see how it compares. You can be anonymous as a Niche user but you do need a login.
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With D22, I tried college raptor with an anonymous login, and actually its estimates were quite close to the packages that she ended up being offered. It may be because our household finances are quite simple. But you can always use an anonymous login with the net price calculators on the college board site and then you only have to enter the information once. Frankly, I have a few anonymous emails that I use. Each for a different purpose from subscription lists, to newspaper/magazine sites, to online forums and shopping/coupons. I prefer not to share my personal address widely so only friends and family have that.
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Years ago, there was a site called College Abacus that attempted to do this by web scraping colleges’ net price calculators. But it has been defunct for a while.
The closest thing would be that for colleges using The College Board net price calculator, you can create an account to save information and then use that information when you use another college’s net price calculator from The College Board. But obviously that doesn’t work for colleges using other net price calculators.