I view Perl as a tool —a very nice tool —but a tool. Chosing a college because their CS department is Perl friendly (does this mean they won't flunk you for using Perl? Or that they actually teach Perl?) seems a bit of a misplaced priority. What I would look for is a CS department which isn't run by programming language bigots ("language X is horrid because it doesn't have the left-handed ternary tree data type and only a fool would use it") and has good faculty teaching undergrads, good potential for networking (of the human kind), and a fairly rigorous (in technical, not just workload, terms) curriculum.

I've one offspring in college (sophomore) and one in high school (also sophomore). I'm also very glad I live in the Northeast; it's not hard to find quite a few world class schools within a 3 hour drive.