I thought I did have financial safeties. A couple of those I pulled right off of best value colleges lists. I did however screen out schools that didn’t seem to have computer science programs that were better than PLU’s since that is the “school to beat”.
My dad will likely not have an increase of income, especially not one that humongous unless something unexpected happens with the business as a whole (being bought up by a larger company, change in insurance practices etc). A lot of times income increases are because the government has given money to incentivise them to pay for changes they are pushing so the increase isn’t really usable.
My sister may be graduating in 2 years. However, she also might go on to a masters program or need continued financial assistance to get established. If she goes the law school path I think that takes awhile.
I did run some NPC’s. The bulk of them print out a decently lower number them what I have been getting from schools (± 5-15k).
And @austinmshauri is correct. I don’t exactly know what bargaining power I really have. I transferred from a private Christian school to a public school saving them roughly a total of 70k dollars over the years (mind you I did this not for financial reasons at the time. The private school was full of kids and teachers who didn’t care so I left). Unfortunately despite my hopes and instructions, I do not think they saved that money for my college fund. Still, I think I can make a good argument that I deserve more than my sister for tuition since she did private school for all years of high school. She also noted that the school was lacking but instead chose to pay full tuition to take 2 classes there (and commute to the local public school for the rest) so she could be with her friends.
Also I know what I want to do in college, probably already have enough skills to get a decent job doing it, and am going into a promising field with a good salary. Hopefully, they realize that paying for my college really isn’t a super risky investment.