This sounds very familiar!
“Premed” brings two things to mind right away. One is that most students who start off university as premed students end up choosing some other path. This is entirely okay and normal. The other thing that comes to mind is that medical school is very, very expensive. If a student is serious about premed, they should budget up front to not only make it through their bachelor’s with as little debt as possible (preferably none), but it would be even better to leave some $$ in the bank or a college fund for medical school. Also, for those who start off premed and end up on a different path, some of the likely “different paths” involve some kind of graduate school. While PhD’s are usually funded, master’s degrees are often (usually?) not, and there are some other options that also are often not funded. Thus if you can save some $$ in the bank for medical school, and if your child chooses a different path, then the $$ in the bank might still end up being important.
Some other things that comes to mind when I hear “premed” is that there are a huge number of universities that are very good for premed, and that premed classes are very challenging. At any very good university, including your very good in-state public flagship, premed classes are going to be very challenging. It might be a good thing to come into university in the top 1/2 or even top 1/4 of the incoming students, because premed classes will still be tough (both daughters had majors that overlapped a lot with premed classes).
So “affordable” and "arrive on campus in the top 1/4 of incoming students (based on high school stats, perhaps) might mean that university selection for a potential premed student might be very straightforward and even boring.
Which is a very slow way to say that UMD is a very good choice here. Given your child’s great stats, you might think that somewhere with more challenging admissions might be possible, and it might. However, premed classes at UMD will be challenging, and you will save money that can be used to pay for medical school (or a master’s degree in cellular biology, or a law degree, or something else, if any of these ends up being the preferred path instead of medical school).
Someone above suggested UVM. It is a very good university in a very attractive small city. They have a hospital on campus (or very close by – useful for getting volunteer hours) and are very good for premed (and for pre-vet, which has the same required classes). Merit aid seems quite likely and should get it under $50k/year. It will however probably still cost quite a bit more compared to UMD, and it is not clear to me what the advantage would be over UMD. I might say most of the same things about U.Mass or UNH or one of the SUNY’s.
Of course the very top ranked schools such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford do not have merit based aid, and given that you do not qualify for need based aid will come in way above $50k per year (except maybe for someone going into Stanford with an athletic scholarship). While these schools might get a higher percentage of their undergraduates into medical school, a lot of this, possibly all of this, comes from the level of students who start at these schools in the first place. It is not clear that arriving at Harvard in the middle 1/3 of the incoming freshman class will give you any better chance of getting to medical school compared to arriving at UMD in the top 1/3 of the incoming freshman class.
UMD does not meet your “ideally under 10,000” size. UVM would be way closer to this, and is a very good university as long as you do not mind getting quite a bit closer to your $50k limit.
By the way, we did look at highly ranked LACs in the northeast for a daughter with similar stats. The problem we ran into was that the highest ranked and best known LACs in the northeast do not have merit based aid, and are way, way over $50k per year in cost.