I appreciate all the responses.
Some of them surprise me.
For example, my wife and I (she works half time) make right on $90,000 a year, and we qualify for HUGE financial aid provided by the schools we are looking at for our now HS junior daughter (we also have an 8th grade son). For example, most of the schools use all of the following to figure yearly cost:
Tuition
Room and Board
Books
Travel
Personal Expenses
With all of those things considered, the schools we're looking at all range from about $58,000-$62,000 per year. BUT, based on financial need only (using their online calculators), our costs are down to anywhere from $11,500-$14,000 per year.
We are actually going to let our daughter take a small loan to help...that will be her contribution. A loan of $3500 per year is figured in, so she would graduate with $14,000 in loans...that seems reasonable and acceptable to me, and who knows, depending on how things are going, we might help her pay those off when she's done (perhaps a nice graduation present).
So, our cost is expected to be anywhere from $8,000 to $10,500 per year. When you consider that $1300 of that is for "personal expenses" which we would be paying if she still lived at home anyway and some of that is for "board" which we would also be paying, this seems very doable to me.
One of the ways to get that type of financial aid is to make sure not to have a ton of liquid cash. So, we had started to accumulate some, so we did something about that...replaced the siding on our house now (it needed it soon) rather than wait until after she starts college, and we're going to pay our lone car loan off a year early...it's at 0% interest, but we don't want the extra cash sitting there in our bank account, because the university will just take it. Any additional extra money we accumulate from now until our financial awards are given next year will be thrown at the mortgage.
I don't want to cheat anyone, and we will be truthful about how much money we have (not going to hide cash in a jar somewhere and say we don't have it), but we will use the rules in place to our advantage.
The weird thing about all this college researching is that for my family, it costs significantly less to send my daughter to an Ivy League school or several other top-tier schools than it would be to send her to a mediocre private school and even most state schools. Ivy League schools don't give athletic or academic scholarships...it is all based on financial need.
Here's a list of colleges that meet 100% of demonstrated need (many of these have online calculators where you can get a very good estimate of the amount you will have to pay):
Colleges That Claim to Meet Full Financial Need - US News
Also, if the loan you get is a subsidized student loan (most are), then the government pays the interest while you are in school, so if you take $14,000 in loans while a student, it's just $14,000 on the day you graduate. If you have that money then, you can simply pay it off and never have to pay interest.