Which schools beat SUNY Stony Brook for Computer Science?

Agreed - a lot of the SUNYs are good solid universities, and some are really great.

OP, do your parents make a lot of money and are they willing to shell out $60K+ a year? You named a bunch of public universities in states you are not a resident of. Those universities are not going to give a lot of aid to a nonresident student, especially if as you say your stats don’t put you at the top of the pack. There are some public universities that are well-known for giving out excellent aid to nonresident students but they’re not any of the ones you listed. (They tend to be public universities who otherwise would have a hard time attracting students to their unis, like Alabama and Iowa.)

Also, Long Island isn’t any less the real world than Blacksburg, West Lafayette, Irvine, Madison or College Station. It’s simply closer to where you grew up.

That said, Binghamton is also a great school, and the University at Buffalo has a good reputation in CS too.

There are also some middle ground universities that are less competitive than the likes of Caltech/MIT/Stanford but still have good reputations and good programs! What about a place like Boston U (29% acceptance rate), Northeastern (29%), Lehigh (30%), University of Rochester (35% - with an excellent computer science department); RPI (38% acceptance rate), Case Western (39%), WPI (44% acceptance rate), Syracuse (52%) or Rose-Hulman (62% acceptance rate)? You don’t have to go to the tippiest-top college in your particular field to do well, and frankly undergraduate ranking doesn’t really matter all that much. If you’re going to be truly miserable at Stony Brook - or you really want a better experience or to go far away from home - it might be better for you to go somewhere like Northeastern, Case Western or Lehigh - which may be ranked slightly lower in CS but will give you the kind of experience you want in undergrad.