Coming to this thread very late, but I enjoyed the conversation! My D22 was like yours – 36 ACT, salutatorian, high-level research in high school, always the brainy and cerebral kid. She wanted linguistics at a smallish-medium school with like-minded peers. I think she really envisioned sitting under a tree and discussing philosophy and literature with an equally cerebral circle of friends – something she did not have in high school. 
Unfortunately, she was not willing to consider honors colleges at larger state schools, so everywhere she applied was a reach – plus a couple of safeties that she really didn’t want to attend or weren’t ideal for her major.
She didn’t know much about linguistics and the various subfields before college, and at the time, she thought she wanted psychology, too.
She landed at Rice (Emory was her close second choice), which has a pretty small linguistics department but with a handful of very well-respected professors. (They recently lured a celebrated professor away from WashU, lol.) And over the last three years, my daughter learned that a) she didn’t care for psychology, b) she continued to love Latin and Greek so added classics as a second major, and c) she loved morphology and syntax and phonetics – but not so much sociolinguistics.
She did like historical linguistics and really vibed in her Indo-European class. Rice didn’t offer a computational linguistics class for the last three years (which is kind of shameful since there’s such an emphasis on CS) – I was hopeful my daughter would like it because it seems to have the most potential for a linguistics career without a PhD, but alas, she has zero interest.
Anyhow, the school has been a fantastic fit overall (she’s not the outdoorsy type and is perfectly happy in urban-with-a-real-campus), but it is really stingy with merit. There is some, but it would be unusual to knock $30K off the sticker price.
Daughter is now applying to grad programs in speech-language pathology. It took her a long time to ponder what she might do with linguistics – we thought she’d stay in academia for the long haul, but she’s leaning against that from a practical standpoint. (She doesn’t want to be in school for another 6 years, and if she is, she wants to be employed at a university soon afterward, and there’s no guarantee of that in linguistics.) She’s got some other connections to the speech world, too, so this makes sense for her.
Just some things to think about as your kid considers a linguistics degree!
