All of these schools are very hard to get into. BU and Pitt are hard to call safeties for anyone. As far as your list, getting in for CS will be even tougher for many. I would look at more midrange CS schools to add to your list.
As far as Northwestern goes, it’s not in the tier of CMU/Stanford/UCB/UCLA when it comes to CS reputation. After those very few “tippy top programs”, there are a lot of other schools in the tier below that are great for CS. I’ll come back to this in a second.
Are you planning to go into industry or academia? If you’re going for academia, paying attention to the top CS schools makes more sense. However, generally in CS but particularly in industry, the field is mainly about your abilities and connections to a lesser extent. The big name schools get your foot in the door, but there are other ways to do that as well. Finding a better fit can often be more important that being a big research powerhouse.
You touch on that with the question about the experience as a student at those in CA. They will have bigger class sizes and getting the classes you need could be difficult, depending on a variety of factors. I don’t think you need specifics quite yet, so I’ll spare those, but @ucbalumnus knows that area well if you really want to know all the ins and outs. Fit can be an important factor, so don’t get blinded by ranks if you really wouldn’t fit or learn well at a certain school. So, if Northwestern is really that good of a fit, it will be absolutely fine for CS. They’re investing in the department there as well, so it’s only going to get better. It’s a lot more student focused when compared to many impersonal research powerhouses.
The suggestion of Harvey Mudd (despite the link having little relevance) is another reach but would be a great example of both high ranking and student focused CS. I think the bigger problem is that you need more matches, not reaches though. Consider swapping in Harvey Mudd for one of your other reaches if you’re looking for a better fit. That said, Harvey Mudd’s acceptance rate for CS is very low, in the range of 10% or so.
If you’re looking for student focused CS in Boston and are going the industry route (co-op program school), check out Northeastern, which actually developed and maintains a teaching language and program used by many programs. It also has lots of combined majors with that flexibility Northwestern has. Northwestern I believe uses it now even.
@Jpgranier The irrelevance of that link has been pointed out several times to him by at least three posters now.
Here’s the time I confronted him on it, so you can see his reasoning: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/20383138#Comment_20383138
That link has been posted by him 5 more times in the past month, despite being sponsored content for a banned site on CC and having absolutely zero methodology.