What do you mean by “too much”?
The federal student loan amount for freshmen is fixed, 5.5k (with the added loans for soph, jr, sr years they add up to what a college graduate can be sure to pay back over 10 years.)
Any loan over 5.5k is on your parents (and you really don’t want to do that to them).
If you run the NPC, you should first see NET PRICE, that is, price without loans.
If that price+5.5k matches your need (as per EFC*) AND that result is okay for your family, print it out and feel free to apply ED.
If the actual offer is much lower, you can show the estimate from the NPC and say you applied ED based on the NPC results, which you could afford, but the actual offer makes it impossible financially to afford and you must thus turn down the offer.
If the net price is, say, 39k above EFC and they show “federal loans: 5.5k, parent contribution 10k, parent loans 20k, student contribution 3.5k” then the school is not affordable and you can’t apply ED.
If the NPC DOESN’T include potential merit you can chance it if your stats place you in the top 10% applicants (check out the CDS, Typing either college name cds or college name collegedata).
In any case if you can’t afford the school from parent income+parent savings+(financial aid+ scholarship)+ personal savings + the 5.5kloans, you write the schol and explain they’re not affordable, and then the ED agreement becomes void. (Sometimes the college offers more money but it’s extremely uncommon and usually tied to a new factor such as a parent losing their job or unlisted medical costs.)
So, if you run the NPC and it looks like the cost is unaffordable, don’t waste your ED chance on a college that will be unaffordable -find a similar college that will be.
(*EFC is the minimum a family can expect to pay. It’s usually much higher than what the family expected.)