Truth be told, Nashville is not at the top of the list because I really can't stand country music - sorry.
It's not as if they pipe country music through loudspeakers around town and force you to tune all your car radio presets to the country stations.
Nashville is not a cheap place to live anyway.
I'm also from the same areas as jabogitlu and agree that being Catholic isn't an issue - we had a couple Catholic families when I was in school growing up in the 90s-early 00s in Kingsport and it was never really an issue. There is some criticism in the pulpits of the mostly conservative evangelical churches in the area, but it doesn't seem to be an issue on the street.
I also graduated from ETSU and while I think the education itself was of good quality, the problem with a lot of the schools on these lists is that they are rural and not located near major job centers. If a school is "okay," but not exceptional, say like King, Lincoln Memorial, or ETSU, marquee employers are not going to recruit there much as there are probably just as good or better schools located closer to them. Furthermore, students aren't going to get a lot of opportunities for internships, etc., because there are no meaningful employers located in the area.
Let's say that Lincoln Memorial does have an excellent computer science program - it doesn't really matter as there are probably few if any commutable IT/CS internships from rural Harrogate, and there are no employers of note in that area. Employers in Knoxville can more easily recruit from UT-Knoxville. The kid graduating from LMU, even if it is a top notch program and they have great grades, is going to be at a distinct disadvantage compared to an average grad at an average in a major metropolitan area.
I would recommend TTU or UT-K if someone is majoring in CS. I'd avoid small rural colleges, no matter their ranking. I also work in IT and most of the ETSU graduates I know who majored in CS/IT had to leave Tennessee in order to get decent jobs.
^ Good points above. I'd also throw into the ring that CS/IT is such a huge field. If your son is interested in logistics systems and how IT dovetails into that field, UM is the way to go. Or with Geographic Information Systems, as there's a large presence on campus with the Center for Partnerships in GIS. So it really does depend on specific interests going forward.