Your son's "quandry" is that he's trying to decide between three excellent choices: no matter where he goes, he will have to try, and try hard, to get a bad education.
All three schools will look very good to potential employers.
All three schools will enable him to get a major in the Classics; Hopkins has spoken of starting him with graduate-level courses.
All of the schools will act as a sufficient springboard to a Master's or PhD: Maryland and Hopkins in fact will give him a Master's in five years. Not bad.
The question to my mind, if you will bear my "sententiousnessosity," is threefold:
1) Which will give him the best undergraduate experience (friends, lifestyle, overall "feel" and atmosphere, accessibility of professors instead of TAs, ability to change emphasis within engineering, or major?)
2) Which is the best in terms of
i) absolute cost
ii) cost-to-benefit ratio
3) What does he want to do with his life? "Hands-on" engineer, climb the corporate ladder, start his own business? For hands-on I'd rank Maryland, then Hopkins, then Harvard; for climb-the-ladder Harvard would give an initial advantage, but corporate politics or other factors could negate this; for catapult-into-corner-office it's Harvard; Harvard would give "man in the street" cred for his own business, but within the engineering community, it'd be Maryland, unless he wants to work for a "Beltway Bandit" in which case both Maryland and Hopkins would be good -- the whole local thing.
His MBA-style decision tree will have to weight the probability of each of these factors and their relative importance.
As Zasu said in The Lion King:
(sighs) "Simba...Good Luck."
Cheers!
I think you've hit a lot of the key issues with which my son is wrestling.
I think he (and I) may have our own take on some of the answers that might be a little different than yours, but we're all in the same ballpark, here.
For better or worse, I think the decision will likely be driven by some short-term answers to short-term questions, if for no other reason than it's a lot easier to figure out what's important in the short-term than what's important in the long-term. Some of the issues you raise (and that we've thought about) are pretty long-term (corner office of a big company? entrepreneur of your own firm? get involved in start-ups and move from project to project? international work? stay local?).
I think some of the questions that will drive this will include: Will Harvard grant him Advanced Standing, making it much easier to pursue both engineering and classics? He seems to have already met the criteria, as far as we can see from Harvard's website, but hey, until we actually ask someone in charge, we don't really know. Precisely how do any core requirements for degree programs intersect with the wish to do both engineering and classics? At Maryland, he already has all or nearly all his core requirements knocked out through AP exams (this is, in a way, sort of analogous to the Advanced Standing program at Harvard) and at Hopkins, we've been told they have no core requirements, so even though their use of APs is very limited, it shouldn't be hard to re-purpose all those non-engineering courses you gotta take anyway to the second major field.
Some other questions for Harvard: My son can take courses at MIT. How many can he take? How close can he get to an SB in civil engineering (not a major offered by Harvard, but my son's first pick) while following the mechanical engineering program? How, precisely, does their bachelors/masters in engineering program work (Both Maryland and Hopkins have a pretty-well defined 5-year program, Harvard is sort of vague. Okay, not sort of vague - they only mention the existence of the program in passing.)?
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