My kids both wanted small private schools. They had the stats to likely get accepted into our excellent top State U’s - but that wasn’t the educational environment they wanted. So the deal was they had to earn enough in scholarship money to keep the cost reasonable.
They do NOT attend the “best” school they could get accepted into. (loosely defining “best” as schools whose names routinely get thrown around on CC and appear at the top of rankings). Why didn’t they? Because they wanted to earn enough merit money to graduate without debt, and we couldn’t afford $60k/year.
They specifically targeted schools with strong honors programs. They needed to be at the top of the stats pool to earn enough money, but didn’t want to be outliers. We spent a lot of time learning about the academic environments and Honors programs/colleges at each school, and yes, there is a wide range of incredibly amazing programs to those that just slap a label of Honors without doing much.
D’s program has offered her trips to nearby major cities to visit museums and see shows, free tickets to cultural events in the city the school is in, special sections of classes only for Honors (while her largest class anyway has been 24 students, she’s had Honors sections with as few as 9 - they lower the threshold for minimum students needed to run a class if it’s Honors). She’s got a separate Honors advisor, and they’ve helped her apply for grants and stipends that have allowed her to spend her summers doing research in Europe. While many might consider her school “beneath” someone with her stats, the education she has had, the amazing challenging peer group she is with, the mentoring provided by the Honors faculty, have all led to her being competitive for funded graduate programs at some of the “prestigious” schools she might have been accepted to for undergrad but couldn’t afford.
We’ll see what S’s experience is - he’s only a few weeks in - but he found a small school with an accredited engineering program that he could attend well within our savings budget. He chose to not even apply to any reach schools - he was very focused on getting a great education without needing to borrow any money.