@pshiao, first, congrats to him. Now, to understand why. CP for CS is more competitive than the schools he was accepted to. Only UCB and UCLA rival Cal Poly for acceptance rate for CS and they are holistic and not purely algorithm driven like Cal Poly is, so they have a little more randomness associated with essays and the such. According to their internal planning documents in their institutional research documents, CP was expecting to accept under 6% of applicants to CS. That’s on par with Stanford. As for the others ranking higher, they don’t. They don’t rank together. Cal Poly does not grant doctorates, so USNWR doesn’t rank it with the rest. USNWR doesn’t rank CS for non-doctoral programs, but it does rank Computer Engineering. Cal Poly is currently #1.
@Engl-E, demonstrated interest in any form has no impact on Cal Poly admissions.
@Engl-E we visited SLO in his sophomore year when we passed by on a weekend, but we did not do a guided tour. We did registered visit for Stanford, UCB, and USC.
@eyem We slighted SLO’s CS program. We thought SLO would be a safe school, and we were wrong. In the end he would have chosen USC even if he got in to SLO as he was accepted into USC’s CS Game program with a half tuition scholarship; UCS’s Video Game Design program supposedly is ranked as the #1 program in the nation (though I don’t know by what organization). S is very much into playing and building video games. SC is his top choice when he found out he did not get into CalTech.
@pshiao, I’m not sure USC shouldn’t have been his first choice even if he had been admitted into Caltech. It sounds like USC’s program is fairly unique and tightly aligned with his interests. Congrats to him. Good luck with the imminent launch!