You’ve already been given lots of suggestions on the financial front. One other recommendation when your children start looking at colleges beyond the auto merit ones. I have found that most colleges provide merit aid to less than 20% of the students (thus, really being merit aid) OR they give merit aid to 80+% (frequently 95-100%) of their students. This latter group of schools is really just discounting their sticker prices, and they do this regardless of whether the student is a top applicant or not. This resource provides some of that information for many popular universities, but if a college isn’t listed in this table, then I would look up the college’s Common Data Set to locate the information. This might be a way to find some more affordable institutions for your children, depending on what your budget is.
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