Wow, full pay at GT vs full ride at UMD is a really really hard decision!! Made even harder by the fact that you can afford GT. We were in the same situation, but our instate option wasn’t as compelling as UMD. Have you visited both schools? Does your son have a strong preference either way? We literally offered DS tens of thousands of dollars to take his full-ride instate option instead of GT, but his heart was so set on going to GT, he didn’t even consider it for a moment.
Answers to your questions:
- DE credits are credit that highschool students get for taking college classes concurrently with their highschool classes. Some states actually send the kids(virtually or other) to the college to take the classes, and other states(like NJ) have arrangements with some community colleges(CC’s) so that some highschool classes taken at highschool actually count double as community college classes. We pay a registration fee at the CC for the classes, and then upon highschool graduation, the student gets a transcript from the CC showing that the student completed the CC classes. Some colleges (like GT) accepts these credits as transfer credits. Other colleges don’t. GT has a transfer database that shows exactly what credit the student will get based on what class they took at a specific CC. To find out what credit your student will get for AP classes, there is a separate ‘AP Credit’ table you can look at.
2). My DS took ECE 2020 - Fundamentals of Digital Systems Design fall semester. There is one CS prereq for this class that he satisfied with AP Computer Science. Then, this spring he’s taking ECE 2026 Intro to Signal Processing. It has the same CS prereq and also some math prereqs that he satisfied with AP Calc BC. If you look up the ‘Program of Studies’ for each college for EE, you should be able to get an idea of the classes he’ll be taking. Best thing is to find a flowchart showing the classes by semester, and the prereqs. I have one for GT I’ll try to send you in a PM. I can’t find it online anymore, I think because it’s slightly outdated since they implemented ‘threads’ last year, but it’ll give you an idea. If you haven’t looked at the ‘threads’ yet, it’s worth taking a look. Basically the students pick a thread which is aligned with their interests within EE, and that guides them to the correct set of EE electives to take.
LMK if you have any other questions!