My son has been accepted to SAMS at Carnegie Mellon and also to the NJ Governor’s School/ science at Drew University. Which one do you think gives a more rounded experience? He does want to apply to top schools like Princeton/ Swarthmore, and others. He likes CMU but NPC is high for us. Math and Physics are his main interest. No medical stuff. (Hispanic, 1560 SAT for reference). Waitlisted at MIT mathroots, waiting on MOSTEC but wanted MiTES which was cancelled.
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Hands down Gov School. 50% of the kids go to a T5 and 80% of the kids go to a T10-T20. Some 3 years ago, out of 60 kids (originally 50, but they absorbed the 10 waitlisted kids because they got extra funding), 12 got into Princeton, roughly 5 each at MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and a bunch of average excellent schools such as Columbia, Duke etc. My son was in tears leaving the group at the end of just 3 weeks. I never thought he was the emotional kind 
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I agree with this. I don’t know anything about SAMS, but my son went to NJ Governors School of Engineering & Technology two summers ago. The year after the program, when they were seniors, the students had shared list of where they were accepted, and where they ended up going to college. It literally blew us away - almost all were going to T10 schools. I feel like it was a huge advantage when applying to college, and also a great experience.
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Thank you so much for your response. Now my son is telling me they gov school this year will be 2 weeks virtual one in person. SAMS still in person 4 weeks. Makes the decision so hard.
It depends on what your goals are. NJGSS is very prestigious, and recognized for its filtering
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My son did SAMS in 2019 and I can give you a little what happened (but not sure how relevant it is since it was Pre-Pandemic). He took 2 classes (Math placement based on testing into classes) and the 2nd class was based on the students interest. The students have a special end of the program project (my son’s group built a crude virtual reality simulation that could give a tour of a school).
My son enjoyed his time there and the overall college admissions results were pretty good, but did not reach the heights that the previous poster noted for the NJGSS results. I would say that over half of the students went to top 25 schools with most of the rest choosing big state schools or smaller LACs. The top 5 schools matriculated by attendees in SAMS 2019 (student collected data) where in order MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Yale (~20% of the entire cohort went to 1 of those 5 schools) so a student can still get into those top ranked schools from SAMS.
I agree with @neela1. It completely depends on your goals, because there were a few students like my son (African American male with comparable test scores to your son) who did not even apply to any top 25 schools during his college admissions season which I believe is unlikely to occur with NJGSS attendees.
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