I shouldn’t have set such a specific price in my original posting, because we really don’t know enough at this point to have a budget. I don’t know what his EFC is because his parents, according to FAFSA rules, are his mom and stepdad, and they won’t share that information with us. I know that with my first stepson, we are currently spending approximately 20k per year after 40k in need/merit aid (at Whitman College), which is why 25k seemed like a reasonable number to me. If we need to spend more like 35k, we’ll do that; if we end up spending less than 25k, that would be peachy! But “full pay” at an out of state school would be a burden for us.
The most helpful thing at this point would be to have an idea of which schools would be a good fit for him academically/socially, so that we have some starting point with the search… then we can figure out, to the best of our ability (without his “parents’s” info), how much these places cost and how much we’re willing to spend.