I think of college selection as a Venn diagram, The first circle, and most important in my opinion, is academics. Based on HS performance you should have an idea where your son is academically relative to his peers (top of class, middle, bottom half, etc) and this is a starting point. I set a minimum bar for my son's choices based on USNews ranking. From here we discussed location - what part of the country? (my son did not want to stay local); big city vs smaller town; large vs medium vs small school, warm climate vs cold. You'll find that your son may not have strong opinions now but he will form a point of view on these variables. This exercise should net him a list of schools, perhaps 20-50. From here, we over-layed baseball talent to narrow the list, and from there specific interest from coaches/lack of interest narrowed the list further. This was a 3-year process up to the summer entering senior year when he committed.