scholarships / college financial aid

So on top of taking care of sick people my youngest daughter had a pile of scholarship applications that were due by this Friday and the 5 colleges that she has been accepted at, have been after us, to get the rest of our financial info, to them so that they can review the info and get a finance package ready. In our defense neither myself nor my daughter have been procrastinating on either of these projects.She has been filling out as many scholarships apps as possible and whenever the application process opens up for a new one that shes interested in she has been getting on top of it right away. So she got sick right when a pile of 15 of them were due soon, So when she finally started feeling better we tackled the pile. While she gets to do most of the work -- all of her personal info, why she thinks she deserves the scholarship and alot of them require an essay of some sort, there is always a page or 2 of info that they want from the parent.

Then since my taxes are finally done I had to fill out more financial aid paperwork for each of the 5 colleges and make copies of all of my tax returns and w-2s and whatever else they wanted. So 5 huge packets were prepared and sent out. Now we sit and wait for them to get a financial aid packet ready. Some of the schools don't send anything out until the first week of April, so we may have a while to wait. Even though my daughter has these 5 colleges ranked in her mind as to where she would prefer to go, it will honestly (and hopefully not unfortunately for her) come down to which of these 5 colleges will offer her the best deal. While a college education is very important. I also don't want o put her or myself way into debt. And all 5 of the colleges will get her to where she needs to go and what she wants to do. I imagine there will be alot of parents and students that will have to heavily look at the price tag of college when they make their decision this year and there will probably be alot of kids who don't end up going to their first or second choice just because the cost is so out of proportion to what the family can afford. Its amazing the difference in costs between these 5 schools. Like I said all 5 offer the major she wants to pursue and will get her, to her ultimate career goal, but the price tag ranges from 20,000 a year to 45,000 a year between all of the schools. Unbelievable. So until we have all 5 offers on the table in front of us and we can do some serious looking at what its really going to cost, we wont be making any decisions just yet.