Yes, you have to realize that the financial aid people expect that you've known for 18 years that college is coming, and they aren't interested in whether "life happened" or not. They aren't expecting you to pay 40% of your current income; they're expecting you to reach into savings, which were accumulated a bit here and a bit there over 18 years.
The realistic picture is that most of our kids aren't going to get scholarships, and since the universities can fill all their seats, they aren't going to be sympathetic to your plight. You can wail and gnash your teeth about the unfairness, but the reality is that YOU'RE going to have to figure out what YOU can do; that may mean a less expensive school, it may mean living at home, it may mean military service, it may mean looking for a job on campus that'll provide free housing, it may mean borrowing. Harsh? Yeah, probably, but also realistic.
We started saving before our kids were conceived, and as we earned more, we put more aside. Don't make the mistake of thinking that we didn't have emergencies come up -- like most people, we did. But we saved. We said NO an awful lot -- to ourselves and to our kids. We're upper-middle class earners, but if you walked into our house, you'd think we were lower-middle income; we've always lived below our means. As a result, we have found paying for college to be easier than expected.