<p>I feel like first of all I have to offer the caution that your child is young and may decide he likes debate or premed more than CS. Who knows what he will want to study.</p>
<p>Second, the info in post 10 is helpful. I suspect four years from now it will be at least as hard or harder to get in to UT and to CNS and Engineering. The lege doesn’t seem likely to change the rules, and UT is a strong school with a low price. </p>
<p>Your child could transfer in. He could transfer in from a CAP/PACE type program, in which he starts at a branch of UT or a CC, or transfer internally, like go from being an engineer to a CS. This is touched on above. Because a good number of kids do drop out of the “hard” majors, there is generally room for kids who make good grades to transfer in to the majors they want after freshman year. I say generally; anecdotally, CS is the one major where that doesn’t always happen. There are so many kids that want CS that there isn’t always room for transfers. Will this still be true in four-five years? IDK. Maybe more profs will be hired and the department will be larger. </p>
<p>If it were my child, I would place him in the high school where he could get the best education and be the happiest. We didn’t choose the local STEM magnet because it wasn’t enough better academically than the local HS and had less good ECs. (And it was far away, which would cut down on the kids’ ability to play sports and music.) My kids were top 7% so now worries there, but had they not been, I would have considered A&M or UT Dallas, which are both strong in STEM and more generous with aid.</p>