4.4 gpa 1560 sat and interested in cs major, what are some good reach schools I can apply to?

College Search & Lists
1

Title says it all

2

It does not say it all. What is your uwGPA and where is your home state? How much can you afford?

3

my unweighted GPA is 3.9 and I am from Northern Virginia. Price most likely should not be an issue

4

Well…the top of the heap would include Stanford, MIT, CMU, etc…reach schools for all applicants.

What do you want to do after graduation? An elite-caliber college is not necessary to get a great CS education.

  • Do you see yourself as an employee…working as a software engineer at a Fortune 500 company? Great - get a CS education as inexpensively as you can…zero debt if possible.
  • Do you want to create the next instagram/facebook/twitter? Then you may want to consider a school where you’ll interact with a higher density of like-minded students, entrepreneurial professors, and venture capital firms (e.g. Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, et. al.). Reference: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236912

Good luck!

5

For a CS applicant, any school with 25% and less acceptance rates is a reach regardless of stats because cs is more competitive than other fields and so many top students are trying to break into it.

6

[QUOTE=""]
...the top of the heap would include Stanford, MIT, CMU, etc...reach schools for all applicants.

[/QUOTE]

Also consider virtually any of the other US News top ~25 national universities. However, for CS, none of them necessarily offer significantly more bang for the buck than UVa for a full-pay Virginia resident. You’d be paying $30K+/year more for similar courses taught by professors (and grad students) with similar qualifications. Unless the last paragraph in post #3 strongly applies to you, or your family is so wealthy that cost doesn’t matter at all, then UVa (or VTech) probably is the school to beat.