My kid is a freshman at Harvey Mudd, majoring in CS.
It is hard to say Mudd or Chicago is better.
It is a matter of fit (though some say this is a cliche).
Some folks may consider Mudd's CS program stronger than Chicago's.
But Chicago is currently building up its CS department with a lot of hiring activities.
There is a CS professor by the name of Ben Y. Zhao at Chicago, who writes a lot about the state of its CS program on Quora. Dr. Zhao, an ABC with a BS in CS from Yale and a Berkeley CS PhD, used to teach at UCSB and moved to the windy city about 2 years ago.
If the kid can somehow take advantage of Chicago's famed Economics department and combine it with CS, then Chicago would be a great choice.
Last year my daughter was accepted to a top-10 school, an Ivy, Rice, as well as Berkeley. But she fell in love with Harvey Mudd after visiting the 5Cs in Claremont, and this may have something to do with her being an introvert. She is super happy there now, doing well academically, having a lot of friends, going hiking with professors on weekends, joining the rock climbing club, playing tennnis every week, and writing for the school newspaper. She took 7 classes last semester (5 in STEM, 2 in Humanities), and this is a heavy class load for most of the Claremont college students but it is just an average at Mudd. She told me that she loved all the professors, who were so much better than her high school teachers at teaching. She likes the small class sizes and the accessibility and dedication of the professors. Her Special Relativity class last semester had 21 students taught by one professor (a Caltech PhD) and 2 assistant professors (both Harvard physics PhDs). The dining halls in the 5Cs are great, and she especially likes the ones in Mudd, Scripps, and Pitzer, all with delicious and healthy food choices. Because of her leadership position in the student governing body, she als has had opportunities to have dinner and interesting conversations with the college president, who used to sit on Microsoft's board of directors a few years ago (This could be one of the reasons that Microsoft hires so many Mudd graduates every year). My kid also has attended talks by distingushed speakers at Claremont Mckenna's Athenaeum.
She will work as a software development intern in Seattle this coming summer. The offer package she received is good, with a great salary, company-paid housing, and reimbursement for round-trip travels between home and Seattle. So Harvey Mudd does has a very good reputation in both the industry and the acadamia. My kid is not an exception (not a computer wizard either) and many freshamen in Mudd have received internship offfers for this upcoming summer. For those who did not find intern jobs, the school offers research positions with its own professors in the summer.
Kids at Mudd need not to decide their majors until the end of the second semester in the sophomore year. I do not believe that it has a quota on how many students it will accept into the CS program each year.
But I do not want to sugarcoat it because not everything at Mudd is rainbows and butterflies.
(1) The class load is very heavy, and kids at Mudd literally work 7 days a week. There are weekly problem sets. They sometimes even have midterms on Sunday nights.
(2) Not every class is small. The CS intrduction class at Mudd is huge now (over 100 students) but the school has enough preofessors, assistant professsors, and TAs to alleviate the situation. The school also stopped allowing Scripps, Pitzer, and Claremont McKenna students from double-majoring in Mudd's CS program due to the lack of resources.
(3) Grade deflation. I read somewhere on Quora that there have been less than 2 dozen Mudd graduates with a perfect GPA since the school was established in 1955.
(4) Student mental health and emotional well-being. This has been an issue at Mudd because of its demanding curriculum. The school has taken notice of it, revised its core curriculum, and beefed up its mental health counseling and support.
(5) Because of its small endowment ($300M), Mudd is not generous in terms of financial aid unless the kid is from a low-income family.
---2 cents by 一個農村來的二本生---
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