I went to New Mexico Tech. It's a pretty good school for CS, EE and Physics. Yearly cost was about $8K in-state. They cut that down to $4K if you kept a 3.0 or above, $6K if you kept 2.75+, etc. These were essentially automatic scholarships. A good friend of mine showed up from Rochester and became in-state in a year. It's not hard to work off the other $4-6K assuming you're not too picky about your campus job. So we're talking about 10% of the cost of a brand name school. Depending on what you're up to, the brand name value may be worth paying 10x for, but if you're aiming for engineering or industry it's probably not worth it.

I don't think NMT is exceptional in this. There are lots of schools you haven't heard of that would love to have you, and some of them are probably decent at what you'd like to study.