My nephew, who lives in a mid-Atlantic state and goes to a good suburban high school, is applying to colleges next year. He's got excellent scores (ACT 35) and a pretty decent high school record. He is going to apply to top-tier schools like Stanford and Caltech. Rather than say to him, "Kid, with only four APs even though your school offers 19, with no academic ECs even though your school has a robotics team and math/physics olympiad teams, instead of applying to Caltech you might as well set fire to $75. You say you want to study Computer Science and you haven't even learned to program yet? Come on," I want to adopt a positive attitude and suggest schools that would be happy to have a kid like him.
I've suggested visiting Santa Clara when he comes out to see Stanford, and Harvey Mudd when he visits Caltech. What are some Eastern engineering/CS schools that would be good targets/safeties for a STEM-minded kid? Bonus points for schools that offer $$ to high-scores kids?
It's hard to watch this family. They're making all the classic mistakes we see on CC. They overvalue good scores over other attributes; they seem to believe that probability of admission to one top tier school is independent of prob of admission to another ("Well, if I just apply to a lot of them..."); my brother says he's not going to worry about money now because if his son gets admitted "we'll make it work;" they're spending too much time on reaches and not enough time on matches, let alone safeties. It's like a preview to all the sad threads we see here in April.
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