Mine took into account my parent's retirement savings. They'd have needed to exhaust them before I'd qualified for any significant aid. It wasn't even that much, my father retired just a couple years later with something on the order of $100,000 saved, and now primarily lives on his teacher's pension.

Not getting any federal assistance greatly simplified my choice of college. At the time the Ivy-league schools offered no merit-based aid, so I went to one of the schools that offered me a full-ride. That was certainly a wake-up call about how far you can get through hard work VS the socioeconomic class of your parents. It's a terrible system, I'm just glad I had options and didn't have to decide between going to college and bankrupting my parents.