Virginia Tech is a large school in a town that is dominated by the university. It’s pretty far from any big city, so the students have to provide all the entertainment - football, fraternities, musicals, concerts. There are 25,000 students to do that. The university is mostly engineering, but there are plenty of other departments offering theater and music and English majors. There is a division 1 football team, and high level of play in other sports. On a Saturday afternoon in the fall, there will be few people not in the stadium as that is the focus on a Saturday. It’s a big American university experience.
Florida tech is much smaller, although closer to major cities (Orlando, Miami). There are only about 3500 students on campus. There is Div 2 sports, including football, but it is not such a focus of campus life. There are clubs for theater and music, but few classes and no major in the arts. Almost everyone is in some kind of engineering or science, but there are degrees in business, psychology, and communications offered. It has a lot of marine science offerings and aerospace.
Want more of an urban lifestyle? Then the other three are better choices. Stony Brook and Buffalo are not going to be so engineering focused as there are many students majoring in arts and sciences, but are also more traditional university experiences. Want that big big city experience? Chicago is it at IIL.
All are good choices, just offer different things. Weather, size of school, sports, major airports, male/female ratio? What’s important to you? My daughter goes to Florida Tech and loves it, but if I were choosing for me I’d probably pick VT because I wanted the more traditional big school college experience and Buffalo is really really cold.