Any suggestions for a good match-safety (besides our state univ - Rutgers - got that covered) for computer science. Stats are 3.95UW/4.67W, 1500 SAT (700e 800m), will have taken 10 APs, two college CS courses.
Here are my contraints (hence the dilemna): wants palm trees. prefers west coast or at least warm.
I have reaches - but would like to add a good safety/match to the list. Common App would seal the deal.
How much can you afford to pay?
Budget is not a limit - would love if there was a public with merit for OOS or a private that offers merit.
ASU Barrett.
Added - any others?
If it’s west coast and palm trees you want and you’re not too worried about budget, Pepperdine (Malibu), Loyola Marymount (Los Angeles), University of San Diego (well… yeah), and Santa Clara (Near San Jose) sound up your alley. All are around 50% acceptance (Pepperdine is in the 30s though), and your stats seem good enough for all of them.
Note that these are all religious schools, of varying levels of religiosity and not all the same denomination.
UT Dallas? No palm trees but excellent safety for CS and warm. They are great with money for high stats kids and a rising STEM school. Unfortunately, they are on the Texas App but don’t require any essays or recs, just EC entry, scores and transcript.
Take a good look at Santa Clara (SCU). Has CS and CSE, in Silicon Valley, conveniently located right next to the San Jose airport. Has palm trees. It is a low match rather than a safety, as it does a fair bit of yield protection - strongly considers demonstrated interest. It is Jesuit, with about 50% of the students being Catholic. The NPC includes a merit estimate, though I don’t know how accurate that is. The merit amounts seem to vary quite a bit among high-stats students, from large amounts to small amounts to nearly nothing.
While it is currently ranked in USNews as #1 Regional West, it might make the jump from regional to the national university list the next time the Carnegie classifications are updated and subsequently taken into account by USNews (due to a change in the definitions of the classifications).
Should I take from your screen name that you’re female? Scripps College is a match where you’d have a decent chance of merit aid (up to half tuition), and where you could major in CS through either Harvey Mudd or Pomona. The Claremont Colleges are excellent for CS and meet your climate parameters perfectly. (Also Common App.) Of course you can also apply to Mudd and/or Pomona directly, but you said you already have reaches, and merit is a lot harder to come by at Mudd and nonexistent at Pomona.
Seconding Santa Clara. Also, the UC system, while not Common App, has one application for all nine campuses. They’re expensive and offer no merit for OOS students, but since you don’t have a firm out-of-pocket limit… UC Santa Cruz would be a safety for you and is a great CS school, although it tends more toward redwoods than palms. And if you were doing the application to nail down that safety, you could also check the boxes to apply to as many of the reachier campuses as you wanted. You sound like you might love Santa Barbara and/or Irvine, as well as UCLA and UCSD. Look in particular at the Computing major in the College for Creative Studies at UCSB https://ccs.ucsb.edu/majors/computing - this requires another layer of application, but could be well worth the effort.
Also, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has an excellent CS program and the campus/weather are gorgeous. The only caveat is that gender parity in the CS department starts out bad and gets worse, as attrition is higher for women. If you are game to confront male-dominated CS culture head-on, though, it’s a great school. (In stark contrast to Harvey Mudd which actually has a slight female majority in CS.) San Diego State is another worth looking at in the Cal State system. The CSU system has its own app but it’s probably less than an hour’s project to fill out. (Just DO NOT neglect to include your middle school math and foreign language classes - many a hapless Cal Poly applicant has lost the acceptance they should have gotten over those lost course-rigor points. And CS is the most competitive major at SLO so you need full credit for your stats.)
Other warm-weather public safeties would include Arizona State’s Barrett Honors College, and UNLV (both Nevada campuses have strong CS but Las Vegas is much warmer than Reno).
University of Miami? Tulane?
You qualify for a pretty significant scholarship with TCU and Baylor. Also check out Texas State University. You qualify for the Presidential scholarship, which should cover your tuition. Alabama is another place that would offer a tuition scholarship.