It is hard to come up with a scenario that favors the two most expensive schools when you have much lower cost options that are very good choices for CS.
I would look at your family finances, and probably see which of the first two choices would work best for you. There’s no exact answer, and you’d need to provide more info. here on your situation for better advice. UW CS direct admit is outstanding, btw. I would rate it above the USC CS, but an extra 10K per year may be a burden – we don’t know.
For a vanilla CS degree, you’ll get the same education at all of them. And unless a hiring manager is an alum of one of these universities, none offers a clear hiring advantage over the others.
Thank you. If $ were not an issue, with the only uncertain CS admit being UC Berkeley (given you have to qualify in 2nd year), would your recommendations change?
Unless there are some major fit reasons that bias you against them, I don’t see any reason to consider others besides USC and UDub.
Even if costs don’t matter at all, I think all the elite software companies would put UDub/UMich/Cal/UT-Austin CS on the same tier of good CS schools (and they’re all giant state schools, so there’s not much difference there). USC doesn’t do badly at placing grads either (and while private, is also huge).
In overall prestige, UMich and Cal have the edge, but I’m not sure how much that matters.
Remember that among these schools, success will be mostly dependent on the student, not what school he/she went to.
UW is the best among all five but based on cost, I’d save the $40,000 and go to USC because it’s in the sunshine, there are tons of PNW students, you’ll have smaller classes, and you can get a great job at Boeing, AMZN, MSFT or anywhere else when you graduate. And you’ll be a Trojan and can hang with our loyal Trojan Family in Seattle when you return.