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If aTm is going to be a stretch for him then Florida is way out of reach for him.

Not necessarily. Admissions to public universities in Texas follow an absurd law that makes admission to UT-Austin and A&M-College Station campus nearly impossible if you aren't in a certain percentile range of your high school class.

Graduate in the 90th percentile and you're guaranteed admission. Fall one spot in your class rank that drops you down to 89th percentile, and admission likelihood drops precipitously. Often to near 0% regardless of how impressive your grades and test scores are.

Lots of Texas kids with very high grades and test scores that are great candidates for top notch schools like UF get boxed out of UT-Austin and A&M-CS that way. It's stupid, and bad for the state and for A&M and UT to not have that control over their own admissions, but it's the law and why so many Texas kids end up out of state.

This. They are trying to fix this issue but it's a real problem. For example I have a good friend who has a daughter who graduated from my son's school a couple of years ago. She never got a B and was all AP classes, graduated with about 70 hours of college credit. Got a 35 out of 36 on her ACT. Yet she was just outside the Top 10%. She got into Vanderbilt, Ga Tech, and UC Berkeley. She eventually got into A&M but she got no scholarships and had to really work for it because she wasn't Top 10%, if she hadn't grown up with 2 Aggie parents she likely goes elsewhere because A&M gave her no scholarships. Another strong public HS in Austin I know of actually had more kids that were National Merit Finalists than in the Top 10%.

When they came up with the rule Texas was a lot smaller and it was the workaround when they couldn't legally use race in admissions anymore after Hopgood. Problem is you now have almost 30 million people in Texas and only 3 Tier 1 Universities (Rice which is tiny, Texas, and A&M). Texas is the same size today as it was when I started school in the '80s but the state has about 70% more population. A&M has grown but certainly not that much (it was 43k then, now main campus is in the 60's). So what you end up with is a lot of kids from crap HS's that have never taken an AP class but are in the Top 10% getting auto admit and leaving very few slots for kids outside of that even if they are great students.

Thus you have a mass exodus of kids from very good high schools in Texas that are going OOS because they can't get into A&M or Texas and don't want to transfer in later. Lots of those schools throw around scholarship money and recruit those schools heavily, significantly reducing the difference in OOS tuition.

My son will likely get some scholarship money if he goes OOS that would take some of the sting out, though not enough for a full ride. As I said, Galveston is probably choice #1 right now (if he can't get into A&M CS). Biggest negative there is it is tiny, less than 3k students on a small campus but he loved seeing how he can literally fish from the dock or go crabbing a few feet away from the classrooms. It's a big dropoff in terms of schools after that (not paying stupid money to go to Baylor or TCU or SMU, 5x the cost of A&M for half the degree). It's schools like Tech way out in the shithole of Lubbock, commuter schools like UTSA, UTD, or UH, or some of the lower satellite schools like A&M Corpus.

I'd rather have him look at a quality SEC public school and see if we can make it work financially. In the end he will likely be a Business major of some kind if he goes that route with a specialty toward Ag or entrepreneurship or some business that involves him being outdoors. He likes the Marine aspect but from a business perspective, not a scientific perspective (that's a crap field btw, lots of very hard schooling to make very little money as you have to really have a Master's or PhD to really get a job usually working for the government or a university).

Anyway, really appreciate all of your thoughts. Obviously we are doing a lot of other research but I just don't know that many folks personally from some of the other SEC schools outside of LSU.