^It’s especially sad because if OP follows this plan, it’ll actually be counterproductive for admission to Top 25 universities and LACs. It may work for universities ranked in the 40s-50s but not for top universities/LACs.
Californiaaa, when you’re an international applying to Stanford, it helps a lot to have attended one of your nation’s top schools. But when you’re an American kid, that’s not the way it works. Each year, Stanford will choose students for its graduate school and it’ll select them from a wide variety of colleges accross the nation. It will WANT to have one hundred or more colleges represented. Sure, students from Top 25 will be more numerous than students from top 50-60 who will be more numerous than students from Top 125. But there’ll be students from each type of school at Stanford.
In addition, PHD programs frown on admitting students from their own undergraduate programs, because they want to increase networking opportunities and provide a greater variety of perspectives/approaches/projects.
Grad school name is MUCH more important than undergraduate name.
I’d think Pomona-> Stanford or Whitman -> UCB would be a better goal than Stanford-> UCLA or UCB->UCSD
(Note that Kalamazoo has an excellent record in terms of PHD admissions)
To get back to your “roadmap”:
9th grade is fine (add a foreign language and art)
10th: cut stats and macro
11th: cut APES, AP Psych
12th: cut AP Lit (double duty with AP lang from 10th)
Total: 9 Aps, already above the recommended number (which tops out at 8) but still within the “reasonable” category
Add College Spanish at the sophomore and junior levels (intermediate classes and above)
Let 9th grade be to determine what he likes or what he’s strong at. Let him try lots of things: circus, standup comedy, charity, youth senate, media/communications…
Over the summer, summer camp dedicated to whatever he likes to do in his free time.
Make sure he does one competitive activity (science fair, for example) and one non competitive activity (diabolo, knitting…)