"So it is ok to go ahead and commit to a school and when you tell the financial aid office no to PLUS the student will be allowed to borrow more than the max $5500 for incoming freshman we were told?"
Do not commit to the school until you have a solid plan that does not jeopardize you or your daughter's financial future. You can go ahead and have conversations with the financial aid office to try to get more assistance, but be realistic in what is reasonable for a 19 year old planning to major in a field that has limited employment opportunities. Just because she can borrow $10,000 a year does not make it a reasonable decision. That's another reason why inexpensive 2 year college, or signing up with military active duty, ROTC, or reserves can be a wise choice. After your daughter has a couple years of college or work experience she and you will be in a much better position to judge how much debt she could manage given employment prospects. Few 19 year olds understand what it will mean to have to pay back large loans.
+1
There are many people here who were not lucky enough to get any of this quoted perspective from their parents. Many people in their 20s and 30s still feel crippled by student loan debt, especially the non-mustachian folks out there. People who followed their dreams since they told they were special and would succeed at them and could do whatever they want, often by parents who were totally supportive, but who ultimately ran into the problem where life and the job market didn't meet their dreams.
Please, for the sake of your daughter (and yourself), at least consider that this route might be setting both of you up for significant heartache and pain with a bunch of debt and nothing other than broken dreams to show for it.
Maybe a decade or more of heartache and financial stress for both of you is worth a small chance of dreams coming true.
It sounds like you are 100% committed to this route regardless of what people here say but I would look into understanding
why she wants to do this. Right now, it's just "she's wanted to do this forever." Well, great, but
what has she wanted to do? Work with animals? Work on a boat? Work on a boat with animals? What did the marine biologists she's talked to say about their background? Is it possible to do similar work with a more useful fallback plan, ie maybe she can become a ship's engineer and work on a ship doing this work. Or maybe she can do something else which is closely related to marine biology but with better fallback plans. Or was it because she watched Free Willy as a kid and decided that was her calling (anecdotally this was me for quite a large portion of my childhood, starting about that age. I saw that movie and wanted to work with whales for quite a few years of my life).
What has she been doing for the past 10 years to convince you that she really wants to do this? Fields like this are not for the faint of heart - there will be people who don't get jobs who are incredibly motivated/talented. There is not any guarantee. Has she shown the will to do this? Does she constantly ask you about going to a zoo or asking about going out on water? Does she read books on animal life for fun? Does she have an aquarium? Or is it a fantasy idea that she never follows through with any action or initiative?
If she's not doing these things, odds are that she will have trouble finding a job because there are plenty of other people who are doing those things. It is really important to understand that fleeting or even persistent dreams do not mean much unless action accompanies them.
When I was younger I also wanted to do music for a career. I love playing music and was involved in many orchestras and honor bands and other things. But I didn't naturally want to do that. I did not just have passion for doing that in a way which compelled me to practice. In professional music, you have to be willing to eat/breathe/sleep music if you want to "make it" because the number of jobs are minimal. What I realized is that I didn't have that drive. Sure I loved it, and I enjoyed it, and I would have loved being a professional in a great orchestra, but realistically I wasn't going to be putting in that effort since I had clearly not wanted/done so in my highschool and middle school years.
What I realized though? I naturally optimize everything. I love understanding things and making sense of complexity. Board games? Sign me up for games that require tons of analysis to play and have more rules than the tax code. Need me to make an Excel spreadsheet to simulate an entire online game to determine the best outcomes? Check. I love that sort of thing and did activities related to that in my life all the time for "free" consistently. I programmed tons of stuff on my TI-83. Now I am a software developer who gets to do those types of things for
work fun. Looking back on my childhood it makes complete sense why - the types of things I do in my job now are the types of things I loved doing in my freetime.
But no one ever told me to think about this when considering what to do for college. The world encourages you to follow your dream. Some whimsical thing that for the overwhelming majority is not what you end up doing, because it's a mirage and idealized version of something.
What does she do for fun on a regular basis? What types of things? Hopefully you see everywhere in her life evidence that she wants to do marine biology. Hopefully the answers to all those questions above are emphatic "absolutely" yeses. Hopefully there is more to it than a dream.
The reason I am saying this is that my own life is a clear example of me misidentifying my "passion" and missing something blatantly obvious right in my face. I consider myself so blessed and lucky I chose to not pursue music as a career, even though it was my passion/dream when I was in high school, because it was clearly not my passion. The evidence of that was completely obvious had I been self-aware enough to see it.