A few notes about outside scholarships. My high stats S applied for dozens of national scholarships with zero success. It took a ton of time and effort, not to mention all kinds of LOR, transcripts (and we had to pay for his unis each time), pictures, etc. It was a royal PITA. However, he was pretty successful with local ones. For younger, more normal smart kid, we didn’t bother with national and worked hard on the local. He got almost $14K from various sources.
However, most of them are not renewable. They tend to give all the money to HS seniors. So watch closely now - watch what seniors are getting and from whom. Some weren’t well publicized in guidance. We only found out about them after older S had graduated. Also, watch out for the fine print. Older S won a $3K/year one. However, when it was time to pay up, turns out it would only cover tuition AFTER everything else was applied. He gets free merit tuition from the school, so he didn’t see a dime from them. Our fault for not reading the fine print but still… Ouch