This is a common situation. Parents with professional degrees frequently (but not always) have very smart and hardworking kids and an income sufficient to preclude need based financial aid but not enough to make paying $75,000 per year per child comfortable.
We found the NPCs accurate in this situation. Some predicted merit based aid (UVM was an example), and some did not.
You need to figure out what your budget really is, and run a few NPCs and see what the results are. If you google "net price calculator University of " you will find its NPC. If your parents do not know what your budget is, then you could run a few NPCs and show them the result and see what their reaction is. Remember that university prices will rise a bit from year to year.
We found financial safeties in our in-state public universities, and in Canada. However we are not all that far from the border which made the “slightly foreign” schools in Canada not too far away for us. There are plenty of good schools in the US that give good merit based aid.
By the way, one daughter went to a school that was only affordable because of the merit based aid. We never talked about what would happen if her GPA fell to the point that she no longer got the aid. Fortunately this never happened. However the failure to talk about this up front was probably a mistake on our part.