This probably earned him a salaried job at essentially any place he wants to work. Or at the very least an internship.
I hope he considers skipping college. There's no reason for him to be driven into ~$50k worth of debt, and I've certainly been happy with my decision not to go.
He could be working with supercomputing, nanotech, quantum computing, Internet-scale problems, etc. in a couple of years at one of those schools. It would take much longer to get there on the DIY path. I know of what I speak: I went the path of most resistance and I was in my late 20s by the time I really started working with people I considered on or above my level and getting paid fairly for it...i.e. building things that millions of people use. I'm probably not as smart as this kid, admittedly, but I'm enough above average to know what his career path will most likely look like if he opts to skip university.
I'm not suggesting he won't be a monstrous success in the future. I'm pretty confident he will be. But, why not take the short cut?
It's the folks who aren't brilliant, that I think should skip college, or choose a super cheap school. Brilliant people should at least spend a few years in the environment of a great school so they can get a feel for how wide and accommodating the world is for a brilliant individual with drive and ambition.
It comes down to what he wants. Personally, I wanted freedom from debt, freedom from high school, and the freedom to work with creative people. Those factors made me decide to drop out of high school (after I had landed a game development internship, i.e. a solid job and therefore a solid resume for the future).
Truth is you do get a lot more from college for your debt load than just job training.
(And just so you know, I went, but didn't finish, largely because I found myself making a very good living developing software and also because my personality has never accommodated being part of the student-underclass.)
Not to mention there is a lot of stuff he could learn at college that would actually be tremendously useful if he wants to continue in this path. Everything from the physics of conductors to more advanced electronics design are things that can be quite hard to pick up from tutorials online.
Instead undergraduates are taught how to write Java programs, which is one of those languages where it's impossible to worry about silly things like cache-line misses, because there are too many layers of abstraction between you and the hardware.... (And yes, you youngsters should get off my lawn, while you're at it. :-)
Most people need it, because they can't do all this on their own. Furthermore, some of them have such good steel in their knife, that sharpening will be a great leap, and it would have been a waste, in some sense, to miss it. The tragedy is that we convinced everyone that they NEED the sharpening to have a good life, even if they have tin knives, as if a sharp knife is the only tool.
(1) in-depth knowledge of math, which has always been an asset. Those that don't go to college have issues here.
(2) met like-minded friends that were inspiring and most are quite successful now.
(3) allowed me to go to grad-school and specialize in machine learning. This specialty opened doors that ultimately resulted in company ownership (yes it ended well)
(4) personal satisfaction in knowing that I can finish something with long term vision. College is only four years, but when you are young it seems daunting.