That was unnecessary. Perhaps you can simply focus on assisting the original Poster.
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Purdue is highly regarded for engineering- and it is on the cheaper side for OOS. It’s not impossible to get into either. OP should strongly consider it.
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It doesn’t sound like Missstate and bama are good fits for OP- but Arizona might be worth a look (it’s not the type of “south” OP mentioned).
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Again I simply provided schools that I know have auto merit so OP can see how their stats will be looked at.
As I noted it was for no other reason.
Once we see how they will count them in gpa form, then we can determine which schools will be appropriate.
I don’t have a full list and suggested those as a beta test.
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I didn’t mention Purdue because it isn’t an urban campus but obviously I’m a big fan!
OP, if you are flexible on location you can co op at Purdue too. Georgia Tech and Pitt also have well supported co ops even though they aren’t mandatory.
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Ok, that helps tremendously. 
Seconding U Cincinnati - apply early for the Cincinnatus scholarship.
Pitt should be another easy app. You can apply right now in fact.
Always apply to the Honors College.
UMD, UMass, GTech ?
(Purdue, Penn State, VTech, UIUC if you don’t mind college towns)
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Oh it’s okay, I’m grateful for any help I can get!
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Yeah I’m very open to compromising of course for schools which are highly ranked like the schools you mentioned.
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Just a note on this that might help frame some issues for you.
We got a lot of insight into this question thanks to the Harvard lawsuit that eventually led to the aforementioned Supreme Court decision. I note this was specific to US admissions, not International, but as noted above the basic framework with modifications as necessary still applies to cases like yours. And of course was just one college at one point in time, but at a high level what Harvard was doing is consistent with what other colleges say they do. Like for example if you listen to the Yale Admissions podcast (very interesting, by the way), their general framework seems pretty consistent with Harvard’s.
OK, so what does that look like?
Well, first, there are people who are in some way treated as a special case with different admissions standards and sometimes in fact different admissions procedures, known as “hooked” applicants. This includes recruited athletes, might include some performing arts cases, might include first-generation low-income applicants (FGLIs), might include people who get put on something called a Dean’s List or such because of their family, might include certain faculty and staff kids, and so on. In most cases, even “hooked” applicants still have to meet some academic standard, but it may or may not be the same academic standard as unhooked applicants.
OK, then unhooked applicants almost always meet some pretty high academic standard, evaluated in context. There may be a little wiggle room and some one-off exceptions, but not a lot. At Harvard, something like 45% of unhooked applicants got the necessary internal academic rating to stay competitive.
OK, so how do you get from 45% to around 3% (meaning the unhooked admit rate for Harvard back then). Well, with two other factors, and really I think the most useful way to think of these is as gates. You got through the academic gate, but you still have two more gates to go. Obviously it is not necessarily implemented in that order, but conceptually.
OK, so the “next” gate is activities, and something like 30% of the unhooked applicants who got through the academic gate also got through the activities gate. But all this is contextual, and also Harvard likes a mix of all sorts of different people. So this is a big source of applicant uncertainty–will the Harvard readers/committee rate my activities highly enough? Will they see a place for me in the class they are building, or will they think they already have plenty of kids like me? Not random from the inside, but very hard to predict from the outside.
OK, so 30% of 45% is 13.5%. Still way too high, so there is one more gate.
And at Harvard, this was referred to as the personal rating. I think as implemented by Harvard and other colleges, it could also include a concept of fit not yet captured by academics and activities. But in any event, the idea is even if you have academics and activities they like, they may see you as a generally good person, but not quite the sort of person they really want to admit. And about 25% of applicants with a high enough academic rating and high enough activities rating also had a high enough personal rating, so that is 3.375%.
I note that I think to this day, a lot of people have not fully absorbed the implications of all this. Like, I think a lot of people think of the personal rating as just something you try to satisfy at the end with a good essay. And that might work, but Harvard and the like at least want to find kids who are ACTUALLY the kind of people they want to enroll. And to actually be such a person requires more than just writing an essay as if you were such a person. At a minimum, you really have to spend many years consciously developing yourself into such a person, possibly going back to well before high school. And for some people, this isn’t ever going to work, because they are just not really suited to be such a person.
But again, predicting what personal/fit rating Harvard or the like will give you is very hard. Again, not random from the inside, but from the outside really hard to know.
OK, so all you can really control at this point is which colleges you select for your application list, and then how you present all this. You can study carefully what each college like this says they are looking for. You can pick colleges where it really does seem like they are looking for people like you. You can then write up an application that shows (not tells) that you are such a person.
And then you can hope they agree.
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Apologies if I’ve missed this, but what are your career goals and where do you hope to work? (US or a foreign country?)
I ask because if your intent is to work in the US then undergrad prestige is not as important for engineering and CS. Other fields it may be, but for the majors you’ve mentioned it is fairly agnostic… which provides you with more options to reach your career goals within your budget.
If your intent is to return to Europe or elsewhere, prestige may become more important.
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Quick addendum.
So that is Harvard and the like. At a lot of other colleges, it seems pretty clear getting past the academic gate leaves you with a MUCH higher chance of admission. Like maybe they like to see some activities, but most people who get through the academic gate have those. And maybe they weed out some people they think are really bad fits, but most people who get through the first two gates are good enough fits.
So suppose you start with an academic gate that, say, 60% of applicants get through, and then 80% of those have good enough activities, and 80% of those have good enough personal/fit ratings. That is around a 38% rate, so much higher.
But then we introduce a brand new gate, the merit gate. It is up to that college to decide what it wants to implement for the merit gate, and it might well be mostly or all academic. But maybe, say, only 15%, not 60%, of applicants have the academic qualifications to get through the merit gate, and then the same 80/80 for the rest.
OK, now that is under 10%. A lot less, in fact obviously just 25% of admits in this hypothetical are offered merit.
But the thing is, all this is probably more predictable. Not perfectly, you still have those 20% each who fail to pass the activities and personal/fit gate, and it may take some work to figure out when you have good enough academics to realistically be in that 25% of admits who get merit. But it is not quite as uncertain as, say, whether you will be admitted to Harvard.
So if you need merit, you can look for schools like that. They have enough merit that a significant portion of their students get it. You have high enough academic qualifications that you would be in the top fraction of their applicants. Apply to enough of those and barring really exceptional circumstances, there is a very good chance you’ll get one or more good merit offers.
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Yes, the parents would be eligible for Parent Plus if they are U.S. citizens living abroad. Federal Student Aid
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@kelsmom @thumper1 : thanks - I checked the website but found it confusing in that it focused on the student’s eligibility and didn’t mention living abroad. ThankS for checking more thoroughly or knowing where to look, then sharing it here. 
(It’s a situation where I’d rather not assume).
Since the financial part is squared - and while it may seem like we focused on it too much, it is THE first criterion for a good list and can’t be dismissed till all are sure everything is squared - next is your strategy and how we can help.
We’ll assume you have TUM, ETZH, etc, under control on your own.
So now you need 2 safeties or likelies in the US both for academics and cost, 3 matches for academics&costs, and then knock yourself out with reaches.
There are about 3,500 universities (think of the US as a continent, the 27 nations in the EU, the 4 nations in the UK, EEA nations, all with their excellent universities or programs, and you’ll find solid programs in each country). In the USthe top 200-250 are really good and up to 350 are solid. For CS (or EE) many are public universities.
Some will offer merit aid but each university has its own policy - there is no national system. Some universities have automatic scholarships for stats, some have competitive selections including after an in-person weekend for finalists…
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And this is where, in my opinion, OP should send some emails or make some calls to find out if they have international equivalency tables, and if not, how do they, in this situation, rate the OP to fit in on their domestic tables.
I noticed that too, but maybe OP is willing to compromise since cost is a big factor, and many of the strong engineering schools are state schools that may not offer affordable tuition for OOS students.
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