I agree. At price-parity with UCSC, I would choose Northeastern as long as you’re comfortable with the distance. The CS program is excellent, and the flexibility to blend CS with other areas of interest is unsurpassed. The blended majors offer a terrific route to broaden or shift focus without leaving CS altogether.
The quality of education at UCSC is comparable, but the chronology is vastly better at Northeastern. NEU students hit the ground running in the core CS sequence, front-loading skills that will prepare them for their first co-op. UCSC students typically bide their time in gen-ed classes while they wait for their registration priority to improve enough to get into CS classes. It can be a very slow start on courses in the major, and then a heavy load later, to get everything done once you can get the classes. (If he has Regents at UCSC, the priority registration could mitigate this issue.)
It’s hard to predict what will happen with the job market, but if I were in your position, I would have incrementally more confidence in NEU’s ability to work with their relationships to keep the co-ops flowing, vs. the prospects for students at non-co-op schools to secure internships on their own.
RPI and Lehigh are excellent too but I don’t see an objective reason to pay more for either one than for Northeastern, for CS. If there’s a particular niche interest or personal pursuit that’s better at one of those, for your kid, then that’s worth discussing, but in the general sense NEU will deliver everything that the others can if not more. Personally I would choose NEU of these four, for CS, even if it were the most expensive, as long as the cost difference wasn’t a huge one.