@NateandAllisMom they actually have a great CS program and students there get tons of internship. It’s close to Silicon Valley but it’s about. 90-2.5 hour drive on a reg basis.
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Our school counselors highly encourage the seniors to write the AO directly to thank them for their time and communicate their final decision - if committed or withdraw their app when the school is not in the running. It is on their checklist and part of the process.
Personal relationships matter and also leaves a positive feeling for your high school respecting the college AO and for future applicants.
And - already said - you never know where the AO will end up and/or if your child will have future interaction. Also, having a D22 - so we need to keep that in mind too - even if the 2 x D21 don’t care where she ends up 
My daughters were both accepted ED and each had applied to 2 EA schools (different ones) both withdrew their apps after ED acceptance and before EA results. They heard back personally from the 4 AOs. Two would be considered safety and the 2 other schools were more competitive - they didn’t expect to hear back and 2 of the AO’s actually copied their school counselor on their very kind reply back.
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Wow! Harvey Mudd! San Jose and Cal Poly are very solid and rather affordable. My S22 is looking at Purdue but it doesn’t crack the top 50. Is Cal Poly SLO quite difficult to get into?
Relative employment is quite important. It’s like checking how many from law school end up practicing law.
Both Cal Poly and San Jose State have amazing CS programs and both are super hard to get into!
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Woo hoo Dartmouth interview was 1.25 hours long! and went well. My S said he wished there were more of those. Guess I underestimated him. It’s so generous of alumni to give their time like that.
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Does anyone know anything about UMD dorms (specifically Cumberland and Centerville)?
Thanks!
Is any U Mich accepted students applying for LSA scholarships including Stamps scholarship? The deadline is Feb 10. They have a question about your options of other institutes. How did you answer this question? My D is a bit confused about if you have to write about other acceptances or applications?
I love UCSC also, my kid didn’t end up applying. One more thing to consider is the housing shortage, even professors have a hard time finding and affording housing. The school has sent out emails to staff to consider renting rooms to students to help out.
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I meant Shipman Scholarship. Sorry about that.
Cal Poly CS acceptance is about 10-15%
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I think the rate may even be somewhere between 5-7% (per a post from @Gumbymom). This year, who knows? Especially with it being test blind. Eek.
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Thanks for the feedback. I looked at the SLO site. It looks like too much of a reach. My son is working towards a 1400 SAT and is maybe in the second quarter with improving grades (3.9 WGPA) and 5 APs this year and hopefully sport captain along with Eagle Scout. Has been scout camp counselor the last last three years. But no work during school, OOS and both parents have grad degrees.
Should he work this summer or do some sort of coding/engineering camp? He wanted to take regular physics at the HS to get it out of the way and I discouraged that.
@tristatecoog Be realistic, of course, but I wouldn’t necessarily give up hope. Per Naviance, the GPAs of kids at our OOS high school bear little resemblance to the overall admission stats published by Cal Poly. While Naviance doesn’t indicate major, last year, about 70% of applicants from this OOS high school were accepted. Difference now is that Cal Poly is test-blind, so we’ll see. Cal Poly recruited in person at this high school pre-covid. My personal guess is that they might evaluate OOS GPAs in context, holistically rather than formulaically. Also, my estimate for the Software Engineering major is around 19% acceptance rate. Cal Poly needs some portion of OOS tuition and their yield may suffer due to current covid restrictions, though presumably they’ll be open for fall 2022.
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I’ve never found OOS acceptance rates for Cal Poly but they are assumed to be much higher. If you look at the acceptances by major for the school, there are wild swings between majors, some with 80-100% acceptance rates and then some with 10-15% so a huge portion of the rejections are from the CS, aero, psych, bio majors with many of the majors much more reasonable to get into.
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Is it lack of affordable housing, or just lack of housing? I’ve read a bit and it looks like vacation rentals and SV spillover is an issue. Housing here is pretty expensive so it would be hard to shock us and the tuition and transportation costs would be less than some of the alternatives.
Well, there aren’t a lot of HS students choosing majors such as Forestry & Fire Services or Recreation, Parks & Tourism Administration. 
The problem right now with the Santa Cruz real estate market is that people are moving out of Silicon Valley and San Francisco and moving to the Santa Cruz area due to Covid and WFH.
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I think it’s a little of both. We know a student who graduated last year and was homeless for a couple of months (sleeping on different people’s couches) until she finally found a room to rent her senior year. It was a very stressful situation for her.
@spaceaquarium. Since SLO does not publish their yield rate or acceptance rate by major, only by the college overall which was 31% for CENG, it is difficult to get an exact acceptance rate.
CS has a projected 5050 applicants for 170 spots. If the CS yield rate is around 33%, then 510 admitted which makes it around 10% for 2021 admits. Previous year’s it ranged from 6-8%. 2019 projections showed a target of 100 admits but enrolled 117, so the new projections have added 70 additional spots.
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Purdue is in the top 20 for CS. Also, they have one of if not the biggest internship job fairs.
Also, @tristatecoog here is a list of CS rankings our college counselor sent us last Spring CSRankings: Computer Science Rankings you may find this helpful and can narrow down your search based on interest.
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@srparent15 thanks I was going by the composite rankings by Ivy Achievement. I’m skeptical when Rice is only 1-3 spots ahead of UTD and UTA. Their students are phenomenal. As a fiend on the other side of the political aisle as me says, “The truth is somewhere in the middle.”