Thanks @PBLR. Her top choices (Smith, Wellesley and Mt. Holyoke) are all women's universities. Clark is co-educational, so I'm hoping she meets some cute men while there. She has a boyfriend now, so it's not that she's shy around men.
She has very high SAT scores (our standardized admissions test) and very high grades, but the other schools are really elite and selective. As a result, they only offer need based aid, which we don't qualify for. Uni's like Clark offer what's called merit aid, which allows them to attract higher achieving students, which raises their rankings, which attracts more applicants. They are effectively competing on price. It would cost us about $280,000 to send her to Wellesley or Smith for four years. With the grant they've offered, Clark would be less than half that cost. We're upper middle class at best and are expected to either have that kind of money lying around or be prepared to borrow it.
Due to demographics and birth trends there are about 300,000 fewer university students now than there were 10 years ago. This doesn't matter to the really elite schools, but the middle tier now have to compete more sharply for the students they really want. Lots of the lower tier schools are downsizing. Quite a few have closed.
One surprise for me in reading these threads is how often in the UK students have to find their own housing. That's almost unheard of here. Even in the big cities like NY or Boston university owned accommodation is guaranteed.