Yes, that was intentional, because the universities you kindly mentioned are familiar as universities with strong CS departments. I appreciate your other comments about chances at Brown and Columbia relative to chances at the other universities, and especially the specifics about UIUC. (I've been to the campus. We live near a different Big Ten university.) I was also intentionally not mentioning state universities (making the assumption that most applicants will apply to the in-state state university), but that is a category of universities I would like to know more about.
Sure. This NYTimes article is useful in that it gives you the raw numbers behind admissions to Columbia and Brown: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/a-few-more-col.... You can see they're brutally low.
I was also intentionally not mentioning state universities (making the assumption that most applicants will apply to the in-state state university), but that is a category of universities I would like to know more about.
State universities get a bad rap because their public view not exciting. Some examples: in Iron Man Tony Stark was wearing an MIT sweatshirt and in Swordfish, Stanley Jobson was a graduate from CalTech. State universities will never be able to replicate that kind of effect, an effect which is very important to young people.
That being said, once you examine reality, state universities can be quite exciting. Here are some bullets for you (sorry it's from UIUC again, but it's the one I know the most about):
* Paypal's founder and two cofounders of YouTube went to UIUC.
* Awesome speakers pass through regularly (I saw Larry Wall last year, I saw Alan Kay a couple of days ago, and I'm planning to see Stephen Wolfram tomorrow).
* There are a lot of hacker-like places on campus. For example, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications invented the first popular graphical web browser. There's also Wolfram Research with Mathematica and Wolfram alpha.
* The Department of Energy and private utilities are essentially dumping money into the Information Trust Institute for securing the powergrid. In fact, there's a conference next week with tons of interesting speakers on this topic.
* A $30,000 dollar prize (the Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize) is awarded each year to the student who "has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or demonstrated remarkable inventiveness in other ways."
As someone who lives in Central Illinois, I'll take issue with your comment. While it's not quite the same as living in New York, there's a lot to like about living here. There's plenty of things to do, and you're only two hours away from either Chicago or St. Louis. Post-college, it's a great place to raise kids. The cost of living here is ridiculously low compared to places like California.
However, as a college student, depending on what you're into, you'll end up distributing your social time between frat parties, gatherings at a friend's apartment, campus bars, and Chambana bars (for those unfamiliar with the area, bars let you in at 19 years old). Note that half of those places are filled with frat dudes. Not too much diversity there.
In terms of academics, the isolation is a bit difficult as well. I can't tell you how many security conferences and user group meetings I've wanted to go to in the past year that are all in Chicago. Although for job related stuff, companies will usually fly you out from our airport, so at least you don't have to go to Midway or O'hare.
* Carnegie Mellon
* Berkley
* MIT
* Stanford
* UIUC
* Wisconsin
If someone thinks s/he can get into Columbia or Brown, s/he has a shot at any of these.
I'm bias, but I'll tell you a bit about UIUC. We've got something called work life balance (pretty much every party scene imaginable: frat, hacker, LGBT, sober, etc). We're also a top five CS program, ranked as the #1 most wired college by PC Magazine (2008), and ranked a top 25 program for entrepreneurship education by Entrepreneur magazine. Feel free to pass my email along (in my profile) to whoever is applying to college. I've given advice to several HNers on what it's like to study CS at UIUC.
Of course, you have to get over the fact that you're in central Illinois.
EDIT: A few words about large versus small CS departments. Small CS departments tend to be much more traditional and suffer from a severe lack of systems. This means they usually are heavy on the theory and things like security and web application programing are limited or nonexistent. Large CS departments have more money, more professors, and more to offer in terms of subject area. Make sure you look at the course catalog from the last several years for each place.