[mmt]

> The bulk of available tuition assistance comes from financial aid, which usually isn't offered to families at or above roughly upper middle.

Is that true, though? A few months ago, I was reading a few articles about more competitive (highly-ranked) universities directing significant portion of their own aid dollars to wealthier students in order to lure them in.

Now, much of these schools' motivation for doing so is that those aid dollars spread more thinly among more (wealthy) students means more revenue than focusing those dollars on "need based" (poor) students, especially if the poor students don't stay the whole 4 years because they can't afford even the subsidized tuition. That may not mean much for your ultimate calculation, since it could be as little as 10% discount, but it's still something.

There is likely also merit-based money out there, which may be what the parent comment was referring to, but I have no idea if that's anything but trivial in amount.