Even excluding tuition, room and board for the better part of a year can easily run $10,000. Parents spend thousands of dollars a year on their children while they live at home.
It's not like those costs suddenly disappear when the kid goes away to college. Kids still need food, clothes, and medical services when they're in high school and college. Also, many parents might defer buying a laptop (use the family PC), a car, or a cell phone for their kids during high school, but these become necessary tools that can't be deferred any further come college.
So, yeah... the parents might be paying more than $10k a year to support their kids in high school, then they'll be adding another $10k for room and board in college, plus all the other expenses that crop up.
If an EFC of $10K per year shocks middle class parents, I wonder why they have been so uninformed.
Probably because that's more than ten times as much as it took back when they attended college.
