The "instructor" was a salesman who makes his living selling a particular product, equity-index annuities. He favors these products because they carry some of the highest commission pay-outs in the entire world of financial products.
For your sake the more important consideration, even before dealing with the school funding issue, is what will this product do for you and how tied up will your money be. The answer is that the product will likely do much less than you are led to believe it will and, more important, the contract calls for great costs to be imposed if you terminate early. You would be putting yourself in a very ill-liquid position.
IF assets in an annuity contract are excluded from college financing formulas--- and I don't know whether this is the case or not--- then you could also consider a number of other vehicles that would be more liquid such as a CD-like annuity with a specific term. As a second alternative, you could invest in one of the low cost variable annuities such as the product offered by Vanguard. This would put your assets inside an annuity contract but would not have the onorous conditions for early redemption. The biggest liability would be the tax cost of rolling out of the contract at a later date because taxes would become due on accumulated gains.
Scott
