<p>Some advice from someone who went through the process last year: Think less about the numbers and more about the colleges. You can get bogged down in statistics and scores for hours, but you’re really just wasting your time. There are so many other contributing factors (recommendations, essays, ethnicity, socio-economics) that really don’t get talked about anywhere near as much as SATs/GPAs. Have you visited any of these places? Where does he want to go? What does he want to do outside of academics? What kind of environment (urban/rural etc) does he want to live in?</p>
<p>Also a note on Northeastern - although they have a professional focus, that definitely doesn’t mean research opportunities are weak. In fact, because many students are more focused on co-ops, there are more research positions for undergraduates. I know when I was choosing schools, they always flashed the list of graduate schools attended, and it always contained MIT (just a few minutes away, I talked to a NEU student who managed to adjust one of his co-ops to do research there), CMU, Princeton, and others primarily in the Northeast.</p>
<p>Also of note is that you can do research while on co-op. You often have more free time on co-op than when taking classes, so if you’re living on campus, this is relatively easy. I was considering EE, and I talked to an undergraduate who got real experience as a sophomore, and they have a program for freshman, too.</p>