If you look around College Confidential, you'll find lots of information on merit aid. Some is automatic, some not, but a high stats kid can usually get a fair amount of merit, if they know where to look. It may not be their dream college, but a decent school where they can receive a solid education for a low price.
We told our middle kid, who is a college freshman, that she needed to apply to at least one school where she would get full tuition (or more), so that she had a school that we knew would be affordable. It needed to be someplace that she liked and was willing to attend, as well. She chose a school that gave automatic full tuition for her stats. However, before she even submitted that application, she received a full tuition offer from another school she preferred.
After not getting into her dream school, she opted to go to the full tuition merit offer school. It was not an automatic award; this college practices, as many schools do, the rather gray process of evaluating applicants in a scholarship committee, so they can pick and choose which kids to give merit in a given year. In any case, she had the merit award by end of November, so she knew she was "going to college" no matter what happened. She was also NMF, so there were options there as well.
Fwtxmom, be careful about the CC route if you are looking to reduce the college price. Most merit awards are for freshman, not transfers. If he takes even one college course at the CC after his HS graduation, he will not be considered a freshman by most schools. The big merit is for college freshman - a low cost first year at CC followed by three full pay years at a four year college could end up being a lot more than four years with good merit aid.
