Here’s what I think you should do:
- Form a list of schools you like based on things like academic fit, location, environment, and social vibe. Given your goal, I suggest including at least one school that offers strong automatic merit awards based on stats. Google "colleges with automatic merit awards".
Many students with your type of stats choose a few “reach” schools, a few “match” schools, and at least one safety to apply to. A reach is a school at which admission is unlikely and a true match is one at which your chances are roughly 40-60%. A safety is a school at which you are virtually guaranteed admission. One way to quantify that is that your stats should be at the 75th percentile or better and the admit rate should be at least 40% – the higher, the safer. You should like and be able to afford all schools to which you apply.
Typical reaches for top students include roughly the top 20 private universities and top 15ish LACs (according to USNews) and some of the more selective state schools as an OOS applicant (Michigan, UVA, Berkeley, UCLA, etc.). And some majors (if direct admit…) can be reaches at schools not generally considered reaches – many Engineering and CS programs, for instance, are more competitive at most schools than most other programs.
- Once you have a list of reaches, matches and 1+ safety that you like -- that fit your known preferences -- run the NPC to find out if you can afford to attend. This will require you to find out from your parents how much money they earn and how much they are willing to spend. If you have a higher bar (for instance, <$10k out of pocket per year), you can apply that too, of course.
So – maybe shoot for 15 schools to start with and then run NPC to whittle that list down to, oh, 5-10.
Plenty of highly regarded schools give pretty good financial aid – with usually minimal loans – to families well into the upper middle class. For instance, probably most families would pay less for their child to attend Princeton than they would for the kid to attend their state flagship. That is no joke. So make sure you run the NPC on all the schools you are strongly considering – you might be surprised what your family could afford.
- For you, there will be lower match schools that would offer you quite a bit of merit money to attend. I'm thinking private universities ranked about 70 and lower and LACs ranked about 55 and lower would be candidates for this. Do some reading to identify some of the more generous schools and pick a couple that fit you best.
This would be a sample list of schools for you to apply to, just to give you some idea:
Reaches:
Penn
Duke
Washington & Lee (low reach)
Matches:
Boston U
Sewanee
Beloit
Safeties:
U of Alabama
James Madison (or another VA state school not named UVA or W&M, or VA Tech engineering…)