Pitt is affordable for you so merit not needed. Bear in mind that as a large school, that GPA may not be given the weight the smaller schools may take the time to assign. I saw a lot of very high Scoring Pitt kids who surprisingly did not get into the Honors College, nor did they get merit. A lot of them came from Private schools or other places where the gpa/class rank was not indicative of true standing.
If you want to go all the way west, I would throw Whitman on the list. Pretty good merit money is available and it is a small, academically very strong, very supportive and community driven campus. Also maybe Colorado College?
I think your list looks great.
Thought of Vassar and Wesleyan as well when I read his profile.
Best of luck to him!
I might add RPI and RIT to your list as well.
Highly selective NoVA STEM schools sounds like TJ. If WashU is a favorite school, it might be worth it to apply ED1/ED2.
Connecticut College. We visited and my S19, who has similar requirements to yours, got in with a nice merit award. My D19 applied and got into Bates. She had a similar SAT score. But, I don’t think they have merit.
Sounds like Bates to me. No Greek life at all. Student body is what you describe. But you will need to run the NPC to see if you will get enough aid. There are no merit awards at Bates.
If his reaches are WUSTL and Rice, it’d be great to visit both of them so he can get a feel for them and to see if he might love one enough to apply ED. From your description, Rice sounds to me like a better fit, but seeing them in person could be really helpful.
Case Western will check off all the boxes. Plus they are pretty generous with merit.
An Eagle Scout I worked with who had roughly the same GPA/SAT as OPs son (graduate of one of the Silicon Valley pressure cookers, but not quite like TJ) got into Case as a Biology major (premed) and is getting 23,000 a year in merit aid.
WashU merit scholarships are pretty competitive and I would save the ED for another school where merit aid may be more forthcoming.
Emory or some combination of Oxford College/Emory should also be considered.
Surprised that your in-state school University of Richmond was not on the list. I have heard good things about it.
True that given his preference for LACs and desire for merit aid, ED to Rice or WUSTL may not end up being his best option, once investigated. (Rice says it has merit scholarships, but the applicant pool to Rice will have higher stats than the applicant pool to many of the other schools he’s considering, so his chance of getting merit aid is presumably lower. I don’t know anything about how much Rice historically gives in merit aid.)
[Edit: I see that merit at Rice was discussed upthread.]
He may or may not want to ED anywhere, depending on whether he has a definite top choice by then and on affordability issues. Having several admissions offers can be helpful in getting more aid from some schools (if school A offers more aid, sometimes school B will be willing to match it or at least increase their aid). He’s a great candidate for a lot of schools (with a stronger chance at those that will consider his school’s grade deflation and strenuous academics; I’ve heard that some OOS schools with huge numbers of applicants will just look at unweighted GPA because they have too many applications to review holistically, but that doesn’t seem likely at the smaller schools he’s targeting).