micro:
Thank you for the very valuable information.
We have just one son, but I have information coming at me from many directions. My sister's daughter just graduated from NYU and is currently in law school. My brother's step-daughter is in her Freshman year at Columbia. I'm Facebook friends with many of my son's schoolmates, some of whom are already in college - so I'm finding their feedback from Virginia Tech, Cornell, George Mason, Radford, NYU, Christopher Newport and a number of other Eastern schools to be interesting. And, of course, I've received a lot of information from you.
We don't have our heart set on the Ivy Leagues, but we do want our son to go to a high quality school. After all, it's possible he WON'T pursue a Masters degree and this will be the extent of his higher education. I think that's unlikely, but it's possible. Unfortunately, Joey doesn't have a good career path in mind yet, so I can't very well steer him to the very best medical, engineering or architecture university. Nor do I think Cal Tech or M.I.T. would be a good fit. He thinks that he wants to study linguistics (which most colleges don't have a program for) so that's been helpful in refining the prospects. And I've given him what I think is an extremely powerful incentive to obtain a bachelor's degree in the sciences, engineering or math, so those programs are of interest to him too.
Beyond that, he doesn't really know what he wants. However, he doesn't want to go to school in the west (and I don't want him to either), so we've applied to the Ivys and six other North eastern schools (none south or west of Virginia). We will hopefully get some other offers. VCU's was very tempting and may be what we accept, but I'd rather see him at Williams, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth or Cornell. The fact that he has a pretty good understanding of his race and gender and doesn't feel he has overcome any significant hardships - except that being a physically and mentally healthy, white, heterosexual, popular boy whose parents never divorced makes him something of a pariah in today's society. 
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