My daughter is in a place of overwhelm paralysis around making a decision for college. She applied to her first choice school in 2021 and deferred to take a gap year which had gone extremely well. The original school she was accepted to recently came back with a financial aid package that makes it very expensive and saying yes will require 20k-25k a year in school loans. She has to tell them yes or no tomorrow.

She has other places she can apply to but worries she will find herself in the same spot of 20k-25k loans. She is struggling in part because she doesn’t know where she wants to go, what she wants to study, area of the country she wants to live. She’s having difficulty clarifying any defining factor that might move her to a decision. The two thing she does know is she wants to be enrolled in school by the fall. And she knows she has 130k to spend on any educational path she chooses.

She is feeling pressure as many schools have stopped accepting applications and financial aid is becoming more limited as the days go by, her thought not mine. She wishes she had all the information laid out in front of her from all the colleges she applied to so she could make an informed decision but she will not have that by tomorrow.

How can I help her find clarity and take action?