Why do you say “the poor folks in NoVA have it harder”?
There seems to be some common belief in a bias against NoVa students, but from the hard numbers I’ve researched it isn’t supported. Instead, it seems that there are simply many more students applying from NoVa, and that the likelihood of getting an admission offer is correlated to class rank. In other words, if you are in the top 10% or 25% of your HS class, you have the same basic chance of admission regardless of whether you are from NoVa or NN, HR, Richmond, rural, wherever. But if, for example, you are only in the top 50% of your class, you’re more likely to apply anyway if you’re from NoVa, and more likely to not bother if you’re from elsewhere.
To answer your original question, I believe that any public school that draws a significant number of applications from outside of their own state probably has slightly lower standards to admit IS applicants, and slightly higher standards to admit OOS applicants. But I don’t believe the Virginia schools break out the test scores and GPAs according to IS or OOS applications, so I don’t know how to verify this.
Like any public school, VT is significantly more expensive for OOS students and has a corresponding lower yield of matriculating students from OOS admission offers. That factors in to their admission decisions, of course.
VT does not use the Common Application and therefore is not committed to use holistic evaluation. I don’t want to say they are purely numbers-driven, but they seem to be at least strongly numbers-driven. Predictably, the competition seems to be most intense for engineering.
If your S is OOS, does not have strong numbers, and is interested in studying engineering, I would not predict his chances of getting admitted are very strong. If his grades and test scores are strong, or if he is not planning to be an engineer, then his chances are somewhat better.