<p>I will tell you how we went about it. We looked for schools with the major my S was interested in. The list was big. Then we started looking for specific things S wanted at the school and offered in his major. We made sure the school offered merit money. We still had over 40 schools. Then I looked at S’s stats and compared then to the top 25% of accepted students. After all that we still had over 25 schools but S whittled it down to about 12. He ended up applying to about 8 schools where he was in the top 25%, and 4 where he was in the middle 50%. He got offered merit money from 7 of the ones where he was in the top 25%. The merit offers varied from about 8K to almost full tuition.</p>