I would disagree with anyone dismissing need awareness as a factor. Meeting full need is obviously the most important factor but need awareness can have a very big impact. My advice is check common data sets for amount of financial aid given in previous years. Also if you require substantial aid pell grant percent is good to check. Obviously you have to take into account school size but this will give you a good idea of how generous a school is and how much need awareness will matter. For example I applied to a number of need aware schools with around 2000 students. A few of these schools gave as little as 10M per year many gave around 30M and a few gave more than 45M. There’s obviously some big differences in budgets and how need aware school will be.