Two middle class white kids received full tuition scholarships to U Chicago in my kid’s graduating class (last year two kids also got scholarships to U of C, but they were URMs).
At least one had a perfect 4.0 GPA, excellent standardized scores, sports (not recruited), social action, etc. I do not know anything about the other one (the first was D19’s friend).
@dropbox77177 Not entirely. While there are few merit scholarships out there for the most popular colleges, there are far more of them than there are kids like those. Most (or all) of those kids were also Davidson Young Scholars, and are at the top of that small group. Since DYS are all in the top 0.1% in academic ability, only a couple thousand even qualify. These kids are in the top 1% of that group, so there are not all that many of them.
Also, this group of kids is highly skewed towards STEM, and kids whose interests lie in the direction of humanities or social sciences usually have fewer awards and academic achievements, since there are far fewer national competitions that focus on humanities, and even fewer awards. So humanities kids who get scholarships likely look different from this set of kids.