Doesn't US news have per-degree rankings? If not, taking a more "objective" ranking in computer science of the number of paper awards received at CS conferences [http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html#institutions], UW easily places in #3, among Stanford, CMU, and MIT. Maybe the roommate could show his dad that...
Yes; they publish degree-specific rankings (at least for grad school). However, it remains that people will still consider UW inferior to grad schools even if you went there for CS. When you tell people what school you went to, they're not going to cross reference it with your degree.