Thanks for all the comments, and I’ve picked up some more really helpful advice from recent discussion. I realize I should’ve also included my order of school preferences as opposed to simply just tiers of safety/reach:
Stanford, Princeton, MIT, CMU, Cornell, UIUC, Yale, Georgia Tech, Umich, Berkeley, UW, Duke, Brown, Caltech, Rice, UCLA, UCSD, UT Austin, UC Irvine, WSU, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, ASU
You can probably tell from my intended majors, but the most important thing to me is the ability to take a breadth of courses across disciplines. The problem with a lot of public schools is that they typically take CS through direct admission, and as such, the number of elective slots and course availability for CS majors is typically more limited than at private schools which don’t admit by major. Cornell’s motto is practically centered on this, as you can minor across colleges and take whatever courses you want in any of their schools. Course waitlists aren’t very common either, and even as a CS major, you can easily get into popular unrelated courses such as their Mushrooms/Molds and famous wines course.
Cornell also has an abundance of really great engineering/CS project teams that I’d join over traditional clubs in a heartbeat, and my top choices (+ gtech and umich) also have an abundance of these. Strong startup culture is another appealing factor, but this can really be found in abundance at most CS-focused colleges today.
Now that things are a bit more contextualized, my internal debate was to either shoot for Cornell ED, or take my chances at the four schools I (barely) hold above it and lose the strong ED advantage. Also, as a CS major, there really is no guarantee at any of the stronger schools which is why the list is so reach-heavy (in fact, I’ll probably be adding a few more).
Also, I know how AMAZING UW is for cs (I’ve got a few close friends there and an insane 10% of my school’s previous graduating class went into UW CS direct admission), but one of the most important things to me is the OOS independent experience. My parents agree with this sentiment, and that’s the big reason why they want to help pay enough where I’d be left with a similar amount of debt no matter where I choose to go. We’re a pretty well-off family, and the purpose of not entirely paying off debt was for my own growth rather than financial limits.