@LOUKYDAD You might want to have your son reevaluate the list of schools in post #64 based upon their respective Honors college/programs. In general, the average ACT for students in the honors college/program is about 31 which is comparable to most elite universities and top LACs.
In fact there are schools like the University of Alabama that have an honor college of over 6000 students with an average ACT of 31. This translates to schools like UA having larger high achieving student population than most LACs and most elite universities if student quality is an important consideration in your son’s decision making process.
So, there will be quite a lot of high achieving students at schools with relatively lower ACT scores of the entire student body.
For example, I was accepted to University of Kentucky with merit scholarship and its honors college. The average ACT for honors students was 32 as compared to the overall university wide average ACT of 25.