Given my circumstances, I’m around a lot of students who disproportionately end up at tippy top colleges in the nation, mostly HYPS. Of them, not a single one that I know is full pay, and yet they’ve had no problem landing at these NB colleges. From my own experiences with my kids, we checked off the FA box and we did just fine, as well. There’s no way of knowing whether your D’s full pay friends were met with admissions success because they didn’t check off the FA box or their success had to do with something else entirely. With the holistic admissions system, there are myriad of qualifications other than the FA box that can tip the applicant to the admit pile or the reject pile. Your daughter’s guidance counselor must be inexperienced and new to the game or otherwise quite unwise to inform your family that your daughter should be “getting good news” from the colleges. No guidance counselor or anyone else can predict, given the nature of today’s holistic admissions practices, with enough surety to freely and so confidently say such a thing. What if you don’t receive a good news, then how is the guidance counselor going to deal with that after having lifted your family’s spirit to a false high? The only people who can say with surety are the adcoms, period.