NM is a convoluted and weird program that offers a relatively narrow benefit, IMO. My son made NMF 3 years ago and it initially seemed a great honor. In the end it didn’t result in any tangible benefit for us, though I acknowledge it may do so for some.
First of all the awards actually given by NM are relatively paltry ($2500 one time) and somewhat rare (2500 kids total.)
The real benefit comes from certain colleges which award significant money to NMFs, often $15000-$25000/yr. That’s really great. However, most of those colleges do offer significant merit scholarships, and chances are that anyone scoring well on the PSAT will also do well on the real tests and may be offered such merit money anyway. But then there’s also a catch: you only get the money from college A if you designated it as “first choice” by a certain date. And, inexplicably, sometimes that date falls before the admissions notification date !?!?! So then it becomes a lottery game.
I surmise that most of those kids who ace the PSAT will also do very well on the real SAT or ACT and may submit apps to the tippy-top colleges. But note: Those tippy-tops do not offer NMFs anything. None of the Ivies do, and I don’t think any of the USNWR top 30 offer significant (>$2000) NMF money. The OP has a child who got phenomenal scores and might (should?) aim for such colleges. My NMFchild did pretty well too (ACT 35) and ultimately enrolled at Carnegie-Mellon (wonderful choice and experience) but which offers NMFs nothing.
So who really benefits from the NM program? Students whose ‘best’ acceptance is not a tippy-top and whose #1 choice offers a guaranteed amount of merit to NMFs and who wouldn’t have gotten that amount anyway. Maybe there are a significant number of these…I really don’t know.
My exploration of this is 3 yrs old and maybe things have changed…happy to be corrected.