Thanks for starting this thread! Our daughter has a SI of 224 in Ohio, where the cutoff has been around 218, so we think she is safely a semi-finalist. She has already taken the SAT and has a 1580, so confirmation score shouldn’t be a problem. Both her dad and I had full-ride scholarships at Ohio State back in the day for National Merit, so we had hoped she would have that option.
She is more interested in LACs and smaller schools, but we want to make sure she has some good exposure to schools where scholarship money might make a bigger school more appealing. The only NM-scholarship school she is interested in so far is USC, but the 1/2 tuition still leaves more than we want to pay each year. Ideally, we would cap out at $30k-$35k or less than $140k total.
We are hoping to head to Florida over spring break and look at a few schools there. I am a little worried when I read someone mention that Benaquisto is only funded on a year-by-year basis, though.