I would urge you and your parents to have a conversation about finances. You are only allowed to borrow up to $5500 your first year of college, about $6500 your 2nd year, and $7500 your 3rd and 4th years. Where are you going to get the additional funds? Applying for outside scholarships will likely merit you small amounts of money (perhaps $1-2k/year total). And this doesn’t even begin to cover the costs of room and board. For SY22-23, UIUC was about $16k for tuition, about $29k with room and board. So your parents would only be willing to contribute $8k for UIUC and expects you to come up with the rest? But if you go to Northwestern where tuition was over $63k last year, they would then need to pay $32k for half of the tuition, which is more than UIUC would be for a “full ride” from the parents.
I would strongly urge your family to come up with a budget. Perhaps they will cover UIUC (tuition, room & board) and you would need to get the costs of any other college down to that level via scholarships, work, and loans. Or maybe they would cover UIUC and then split the difference of the tuition amount with you (so if Northwestern was about $84k last year, they would reduce it by $29k (UIUC’s cost) to get $55k. Maybe they’d be willing to cover $27,500 and you’d have to get sufficient scholarships/loan/work for the other $27,500. Obviously, I have no idea what your parents are willing and able to do, but these are just some ideas.
Have your family run the Net Price Calculator and check. But, if you’re right, I don’t see how you can possibly ED to Northwestern. Even under the most optimistic scenario I described above (parents cover UIUC costs and 50% of the extra difference), you’d still need to come up with more than $27k/year to attend Northwestern. As Northwestern doesn’t offer merit aid, and you can only take $5500 out in loans, how would you expect to get the remaining $21,500? Frankly, it doesn’t look feasible to me.
Agree that UIC GPPA would be a reach. UW-Seattle has a ton of majors that are capped because there are more students interested in them than they are able to serve. I believe bio is one of those majors.
I’ll start thinking on these.
Have you thought about a major in digital art or medical illustration? So long as you fulfill your premed prereqs, you can major in anything you want.