Originally Posted by DAD22
That's why colleges are ranked into categories regarding how sufficient their aid packages are for prospective students with financial needs. Many of the best colleges are in the "full need" category: they meet 100% of that need.

Those rankings are absolutely useless for a number of reasons, foremost among them because colleges frequently call steering students into high-interest student loans "meeting needs."

Originally Posted by DAD22
Originally Posted by Dude
Well, if you know one college financing success story, you know one.

My point is that there are opportunities for the brightest students to go to the best schools despite the sticker price. There are over 50 colleges and universities in the US that have need-blind admissions and cover the full financial needs of their US students. That means if you can get in, you can go. You try to make that sound insignificant, but it's not.

It's obviously not insignificant to you, is it? That doesn't mean your story is significant for the population at large, though.

You yourself attributed your situation to a significant amount of luck, so it doesn't necessarily affect the brightest, does it? Conversely, some of our brightest members have shared their stories in this thread, where they didn't have that luck factor. So let's set aside the anecdotes and look at the overall picture, and we see that your story is an exception, not the rule.