@mathhappy I don’t know what part of the country you’re in. But I just wanted to let you know that NJIT has a great Honors College that you’d be a shoo-in for. It’s free tuition + room and board in Honors dorm. It just got recognized as an R1 university (the only others in NJ are Rutgers and Princeton). Plenty of research and internship opportunities in the area. My kid is not in the honors college.But he is a CS major - it’s a rigorous program and he has a summer internship already lined up with a Fortune 50 company.
I second what @CourtneyThurston says about Alabama and ASU Barrett - I am an ASU alumnus, and they have a great CS program. Temple is also very good - they may not be as generous with merit as they once were , though. Still check out Temple. And Drexel too. It has a high sticker price, so you would have to get a very high amount in scholarships to make it work.
Co-signing loans with their kids is standard operating procedure in my upper middle class neighborhood. Going OOS for college (regardless of the selectivity of the college itself), is a “signal” that the family is well-off. During our college search for DS1, I was informed by well-meaning parents that I can take out private loans and I shouldn’t be limiting him. Umm…whatever. I did not want to disclose that DS1 had other issues that we needed to deal with and we have enough saved up for both kids to send them to wherever they got in. Smile and nod, and move on.