Just tell him , if not already known, that his future depends on it....worked with me.
Found it amazing ,years later, just how much of the obvious you don’t understand as a teen.
He will start in August of this year. It’s a tremendous opportunity - practically no 17-year-old has the opportunity to have a complete residential college program paid for. App State is a high-side-of-average school, and the Honors College will give him lots of connections and career possibilities.
If his Honors College essay was good enough for admission, I assume the other three he wrote for the Merit Scholarship application would also be adequate. One of those was about coal ash pollution, and we all learned about Thallium poisoning, and I read two relevant murder mysteries!