<p>Undergrad engineering is not all that hard for a college to be good at. The big differences you will see in quality are at the grad school and research level, and these are what the reputations of colleges are largely based on. </p>
<p>Having a brilliant researcher for Circuits 101 will probably not help you learn the material, in fact it might hurt if he’s good at research but not teaching (more common than you might think). On the other hand, having a weak researcher for your PhD advisor could be devastating.</p>
<p>One of the best researchers in my group is a Bama undergrad with a PhD from MIT. He thinks his undergrad experience at Bama was quite good. OTOH, I don’t have any PhDs from Bama in my group, in fact I’ve never even interviewed one. It’s worth noting that we have almost no researchers with advanced degrees from non-AAU schools, but many with undergrad degrees from non-AAU schools. <a href=“http://www.aau.edu%5B/url%5D”>www.aau.edu</a></p>
<p>We just hired a new researcher who went to Illinois State for undergrad (however for physics, not engineering), which is a school I had never even heard of. But he got his PhD at Northwestern and did a post-doc at Yale.</p>
<p>This is not to say there are no differences in undergrad education quality, just that they are less substantial than grad-level differences and less probably than popular opinion would have you believe.</p>