Expect to use around 70% of your home equity. For this analysis, we simply looked at the cost expectations for a family earning $100,000 per year who has $150,000 in home equity but no other savings. Colleges expect you to use 69% of your home equity for a full four-year degree if you’re going to use only the equity in the house. No matter how you’re going to come up with the money, colleges expect you to pay 28% more if you have home equity than if you don’t. This is less of an increase than if you have cash savings but it seems like quite an extra burden given that you’d have to take out a m...