I, for one, appreciate your honesty.
But please explain to me why it is “unconscionable” and now also "reprehensible’?
If you google the schools with highest average SAT scores, you will find a mix of merit and non-merit schools in the top 10 and top 20.
You can’t just look at stats of matriculated students at colleges with the very fiercest competition, the largest ability to cherry pick, compare them to the colleges Zinhead cited, and deem the latter less worthy.
OP, now you’re back to the ‘corrupt’ comments. (We could discuss this without those.) Many families make a free will decision to abstain from colleges that don’t serve them well. They don’t insist on “the best” by some narrow definition and then rail against policies. They move forward. Many successful threads on CC discuss merit aid and orig posters learn from that, are satisfied.
You want a reasonable price. Sure. As deep a discount (FA) from the colleges as possible. Fine. But as far as we know, you’re sitting on 3/4 of a million dollars in assets, plus monthly revenue from that. I don’t think we heard the net, after mortgages, etc. You’re tying to describe your fears, having only 100k in a QRP. We get that. But you raised the issue of QSV, IRS, etc. And several times, how corrupt this all is.
The bottom line is: they ask for certain data. They evaluate based on what they feel, per their formulas, you can afford. They decide. Many of us feel we can’t comfortably pay what, on paper it seems we can.
@zinhead, excellent points regarding our situation. Had our retirement assets been in an IRA instead of rental real estate we wouldn’t be having this discussion, which started as nothing more than inquiring how to submit the most favorable possible CSS application for the schools at the top end of our list. Anyone that wouldn’t try to do the same is a fool, as was said upthread this application is wrong place to brag.