Saving makes tuition worse. Having a million dollar house and savings makes for a max tuition bill.
Universities charge according to what you own. I don’t blame the parents for doing this.
I don’t think a house counts as a FAFSA asset. The proceeds of the sale of house does. Fafsa is screwed up. If parents divorced but dad wealthy and you live with mom then dad’s income assets don’t count. But if mom remarries stepdad assets income count. Go figure.
What bothers me most about the FAFSA form and process is that I must voluntarily provide private information about my financial status to another government agency and to the University that the government already has and is nobodies business but the IRS.
If the government was efficient and had its stuff together, the only thing necessary for an application to FAFSA to check for eligibility should be my taxid ( Not my social security number! ) and a software application that takes said taxid and tells the folks who give out federally backed student loans whether I’m eligible or not.
My name and vital information is duplicated ( probably with errors ) all over computers in DC and everywhere I’ve ever lived.
Writing this application should take 2 or three programmers a couple of weeks if things were organized distributively and properly. But what do I know ..... I quit! Retired as fast as I could because Rational, efficient and sane thoughts are frowned upon in the corridors of .gov
This stuff has been known and doable for decades.
https://www.guru99.com/database-normalization.html
Call me back when people grow up and get serious.