My biggest frustration with our particular search was an inability to objectively measure worth of any particular CS Program. Maybe that is a universal struggle? Felt there was no empirical way to measure the worth of any program. In our case, after narrowing to our choice schools, the spread between most cost effective and most costly was nearly threefold.
Would that mean that the most costly choice would deliver 3x what the most cost effective choice would educationally? After much deliberation, there was no way to reconcile that disparity in cost. Everything in this world has a price. In our case, paying a premium for something we couldn’t assign a solid value to, was not worth it.