Something to consider… Illinois APs from 3-5 get you some credit. At Michigan and others a few 4 but mostly 5’s get you credit. I am not sure if schools limit how much credit she can get but she might be able to graduate early due to the shear amount of APs that she has or double major and minor etc.
“She LOVES college football and would really enjoy that experience. She also plays French Horn and would likely do marching band if it’s an option.”
If by love you mean starting the festivities Fri night into Sat tailgate then the game, using Sun to resume work with and already thinking about the next game, then many of the schools on your initial list just don’t have that kind of vibe. The big ten schools along with Notre Dame would be your best bet, then I’d recommend adding a few pac-10 schools if you’re ok coming to west coast - Stanford, Cal, UCLA, U of Washington, USC, along with Texas and Ga Tech. Most of these are reaches of course but many of these schools are looking for top notch females for comp sci, so that will work to your advantage, however FA could be tough at the public flagships. Good luck!
I don’t think Vandy or Duke cares about your interest. My D goes to Vandy and we took DS20 when we visit his sister. I asked the admission officer and she told me that they don’t care about your interest. It is also true from D’s experience, she never visited.
U of Pittsburgh also has good CS program with possibility of merit on high scores.
D is also CS applied GT as part of EA as well. Best of luck!
USC. Very good engineering and CS.
And anyone can join the band, even people who don’t play instruments. You’ll learn “on the job.”
Don’t get too excited yet. Getting in is one thing, coming up with a way to afford it is something entirely different. That’s usually the big game changer. I’m seeing a lot of schools in multiple states, so I’m assuming you have a LOT of money to spend on her college. If not, I would pair the schools with some kind of merit scholarship or in-state tuition waiver. Schools like Harvard or Yale is not realistic to assume admission, even for top applicants. For private schools, financial aid varies widely from school to school and you’ll find that they’re mostly NOT as generous as they like to boast. Out of state public tuition is nearly triple the cost of in-state, and they’re generally very stingy with out of state students.
If she’s looking to do computers, the prestige won’t make a difference at all. Most tech companies are small to medium size and it’s more cost effective to recruit locally for entry level jobs. Google and Amazon don’t travel to Harvard to recruit graduates for big salaries. Those jobs are too cheap with with too high of a turnover. In fact, they don’t have to recruit at all. They have job applications coming out of their eyeballs! I would go with a school that’s sensible, practical, and affordable.
@coolguy40 Where do you get your information? Google and Amazon do indeed travel to Harvard to recruit: https://ocs.fas.harvard.edu/bdatfair
I don’t disagree that skills are very important for technology jobs, but every year plenty of kids from Harvard end up at California firms.
@mathmom I’m a tech professional. You would need to look at the actual job they want to fill. It would make no economic sense to travel from CA to pick up an entry level technical recruit from the east coast, if they have Berkeley, Stanford and a whole multitude of colleges to pick up entry level people for a lot less. That would be assuming they would need to recruit at all, because that wouldn’t cost them anything. These are either non-technical specialty jobs or they have a nearby regional office.
Coolguy- you think Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Ebay don’t have large recruiting teams or pay recruiters to shlep across the country to interview?
Based on this alone your claims to be a tech insider are completely bogus. I know the people who lead Talent and Recruiting at some of these companies and their recruiting budgets are ENORMOUS. Do you think Google or Apple worry about the cost effectiveness of traveling to MIT or CMU? They recruit the kids THEY want, and they don’t care where they are living.
They also go to Pittsburgh, by the way. I’m sure they go to both U Pitt and CMU. They also recruit lower down in the food chain at local CA colleges.
@blossom Entry level jobs are inexpensive and have a high turnover. A $100k a year job at Google sounds good, but if you take out the cost of living and taxes, you’re making barely $45k a year. Lucrative tech salaries out of Harvard don’t exist. You get paid market rate for the area, and they know you’re not going to be in the job for long, because you’ll be worth about 30% more after 1-2 years. It’s that way with all tech jobs. I’ve been doing this for too long not to know better 
Not so sure about that. There is no such thing as a singular “entry level job”. There are a range of jobs and salaries offered in the market. If your a run-rate graduate, you’ll get a run-rate offer. Moral - try not to be common.
My son started off at Google at 100K a few years ago. With bonuses, perks, stock options and whatnot - it was more than that then and a lot more than that now. He’d been an intern the previous summer, but as far as I know it was an “entry level job”. And since he’s never bothered to decouple us from his account, we know he’s socking away lots of money. Google flew my son from Pittsburgh to NYC for some contest they were running when he was a college freshman. I’m pretty sure they flew him out to CA for an interview for a summer internship. They’ve got cash to spare.
Guess what, Google and the likes are paying closer to $150K than $100K for software engineering positions. Also where do you get a calculation of $45K out of $100K? Let’s say that you pay $3K a month for an apartment, that’s probably about $2K more a month or $24K more than say Austin TX. Let’s say an additional 5% for sales tax and 2 percent for State tax, that’s another $7K. Everything else is the same. So you might lose $30K out of that $100K, but you aren’t getting a $70K starting salary in Austin. Maybe more like $45 or $50K.
Georgia Tech would seem perfect, sports and top STEM programs.
If you google top cs and top engineering programs and pick out Div1 sports schools.
Berkeley
*Gatech
*Stanford
Michigan
UIUC
Washington
UT Austin
UCLA
*Rice
Wisconsin
*Duke
*Northwestern
The ones with * are the smaller “private like” atmosphere schools that your daughter is looking for.
“Also where do you get a calculation of $45K out of $100K? Let’s say that you pay $3K a month for an apartment, that’s probably about $2K more a month or $24K more than say Austin TX. Let’s say an additional 5% for sales tax and 2 percent for State tax, that’s another $7K. Everything else is the same. So you might lose $30K out of that $100K, but you aren’t getting a $70K starting salary in Austin. Maybe more like $45 or $50K.”
I think you maybe confusing a couple things, sales tax is not on income and Cal income tax starts at 7.5%, not 2%. And sales tax is typically 9% depending on the city, Texas is probably the same, so not much difference there. Comparing Cal and Texas is not going to work well for California, given it is one of the highest taxed states in the country and Texas one of the lowest, and rent/housing is a lot more expensive. And Google is not going to double a salary for someone in the bay area or NYC vs someone in Austin. They do give cost of living adjustments (cola) but it’s more on the order of 25-30%. In your example, say the salaries were $100K in bay area and $70K in Austin, the take home pay after fed/state and rent would be approx $39K in bay area, and $47K in Austin.
Cost of living is not just rent - food, utilities, gas, and insurance insurance are also more expensive in California. And with that higher salary comes higher federal taxes along with the state tax. So $24,000 more in rent, $7,000 in state taxes, $5,000 more federal taxes - that alone adds up to $36,000 Add another $4,000 for other expenses that will be higher (more likely to be more, but let’s be conservative). That makes $100k in California more equivalent to $60k in Austin. I don’t think people realize just how much of an impact cost of living has.
Re percentages, I’m talking about the difference between the Bay Area and somewhere else. Not the actual percentages.
You still haven’t come up with how you got those take home pay numbers. Show me how you arrived at your numbers. The market rate for a premium 1 bedroom apartment in SOMA might be $3K a month but I’ll bet the average single person is going to find something cheaper than that. You won’t be getting a $70K starting salary in Austin either unless you’re complete cream of the crop.
https://www.ftb.ca.gov/Data/Individuals/tax_brackets_topic.shtml and https://www.tax-brackets.org/californiataxtable show the actual California income tax brackets. https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator is a calculator.
There is no 7.5% bracket. The brackets start at 1%, but go up to 9.3% for married filing jointly at $105,224, with even higher rates starting at married filing jointly $537,500.
I will take my chances if someone wants to get my son an internship next summer at Google etc. Just PM me. He will take his chances on surviving on what they pay the interns 