Has anyone's child applied to colleges while a junior in high school and entered college as a senior in high school?

With grade and subject accelerations, DD is now a 14-year-old junior in high school. His GPA, college entrance exams, class rank are all at the very top. And he will have 10 AP classes plus 2 online college courses under his belt at the end of junior year. He could have gone to college even earlier but he wasn't emotionally ready and we put it off as long as we could. But now he has really run out of meaningful AP classes to take.

More online college courses is a possibility but it's really socially isolating, contents are not challenging enough for DD, and college tuition is nothing to sneeze at ($400-$1700 per course).

We discussed early graduation from high school, but we are told that if he graduates at the end of his junior year, he will not be eligible for valedictorian status or National Merit Scholarship (or most other scholarships for that matter). If he could get into a top university without having these formal recognitions, none of these would matter. But it would be a shame to forego these recognitions that DD has earned and possibly risk getting rejected by top universities that he could have gotten into if he went to high school for four years. To DD, it feels like a punishment for graduating early.

His high school is recommending going to college part time and high school part time, taking classes at a local college as a non-degree-seeking student while taking a couple more AP classes next year. But we are finding out that he will not be eligible for college financial aid unless he is enrolled full time. The tuition at the local college we are considering is about $4000 per course. Financially, it would make more sense to go to college full time as an admitted student. He would benefit from government financial aid as well as private merit-based scholarships.

So now, we are considering possibly applying to colleges this winter. If he gets in, he will defer high school graduation until next year, attending college full time but technically still a high school student. That way, he would be allowed to attend high school graduation with his peers at the end of his senior year (and be eligible for recognitions and scholarships). Is that a possibility?

There are so many options, all unorthodox, and we are confused! We would like some advice and guidance but we don't know anyone else in a situation like this. We are in communication with his high school counselor and admissions officers at universities we are considering but nobody has seen a case like this and can't give us clear answers. Has anyone here ever faced a situation like this? Any advice for us? Is there perhaps a better option we haven't considered?

So that's pretty much the standard idea of dual/concurrent enrollment.

Depending on what state you are in, there may be different dual enrollment options. Multiple members of our immediate and extended family are high school-age, attending college full or part time, and still enrolled as high school students through dual enrollment. www.ecs.org has some resources on what states offer dual/concurrent enrollment, including some (slightly old) info on funding for reduced tuition. For example, both California and Massachusetts offer programs for high school students to take community college (or even four-year college, in some cases) courses at steeply reduced tuition as dual enrollment students. Depending on the program, they may be allowed to enroll full time, or be capped at two or some other number of courses.

My school has a pilot collaborative with a local college that will have an entire cohort of (not PG) honors students graduating with high school diplomas and associate's degrees, similar to that referenced in one of the articles below.

There have been a few news items in the last year on students who graduated from high school and community college in the same year. Here's a few from a quick Google search, including some who aren't described as necessarily GT:
http://www2.philly.com/philly/news/...school-and-college-at-the-same-time.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/indiana-teen-graduates-college-before-getting-her-high-school-diploma/

And then there's the option of just skipping the whole question of a high school diploma, going straight to a solid but not elite college, and waiting for grad school to attend a higher-ranked university.