Thank you to everyone who responded, with so many thoughtful and excellent recommendations. In case others are new to the thread, here are a few key things I learned:
- Look for schools that will be more flexible in allowing students to skip certain math pre-requisites, based on their previous advanced coursework. Several people recommend UCSB because their College of Creative Studies lets students skip to more advanced math classes, and it has a great graduate math program.
- “Pointy” kids like my son, with good grades and scores and advanced math classes, but few extracurriculars, will have a much better chance of admission to schools in Canada (e.g. Waterloo) and the UK (e.g. Oxford, Cambridge) because those schools don’t care so much about ECs. However, need to understand the very different admissions requirements for schools in other countries. For Cambridge, for example, you have to take the STEP exam, with results in August – after some US schools begin.
- Consider whether the school also will have broad graduation requirements for non-math classes. Harvey Mudd and U Chicago, for example, have broad requirements. UK and Canadian schools, in general, will not.
- For kids like mine who don’t have the ECs (or superstar math competition awards) to be admitted to the top tier (e.g. CalTech, MIT, Standford, Princeton, Harvard, etc.), don’t despair! There are many other awesome math schools. In California, Cal and UCLA in particular, but also San Diego, Davis, and Irvine. Big schools like UCLA offer no hand holding! (So maybe not the best for shy kids – though maybe that’s how they learn to self advocate.)
- Kids like my son may want a university with a graduate math program, so they don’t run out of math classes. However, also look into cross registration programs like the Baltimore Collegetown Association (Johns Hopkins and Loyola Maryland, which offers a pure math concentration.) Similarly, CGU offers a PHD in math, and those classes are available to Harvey Mudd students.
- Read the course descriptions and professor descriptions to get a sense of the breadth and width of classes taught.
- Other elite math schools (and definitely reaches for my son) include: U Chicago, CMU. (No one mentioned Duke, but it seems to be well ranked as well.)
- Target schools for a kid like mine might include: University of Maryland, NYU (Courant school); Rice; U Washington, U Wisconsin
- Safety schools with great math programs include: UIUC; UMN; CUNY
- If he is lucky enough to attend ULCA, the Enigma club does board gaming!
- Two similar – very helpful – threads are:
Help find math heavy colleges for math head (jr)? (student who is a rising senior this year…and a resident of California, too!)
A place to study pure math— for the love of it (someone from the high school class of 2022)
Many, many thanks to everyone who was so thoughtful to respond.