You are not being realistic. Nowadays even straight A's and close-to-perfect SATs are NOT guarantees of merit scholarships.
If your child does not get a merit scholarship, it does NOT mean he did try his best in high school. The most selective schools, including the Ivies, MIT, and Stanford, do not offer merit scholarships.
Though I didn't quite push myself in effort to the stupid levels required for competing for an Ivy school, I still took the scholarships lie hook, line, and sinker.
In 1992 I had an unweighted GPA of 3.79 (weighted would have been somewhere around 4.49), a 1300 SAT (1250 was good enough for Mensa), a gold seal on my diploma from the California Scholastic Federation, and applications to a mix of expensive private and fairly inexpensive state schools.
Merit scholarships: a few hundred dollars from local contributors like the Elks Lodge, barely enough to buy books.
Hah.
