<p>Your statement about research simply accentuate my point. Engineering education is NOT about pure research. In fact, quality of an engineering education is primarily based on the quality of the teaching, content, and the teaching ability and outside of classroom availability of the professors. </p>
<p>It does not matter how much $$ your lab has, because it doesn’t prevent the cutting of all the classes that would otherwise be available if the budget were there. Also, your lab’s budget won’t prevent the degradation of the overall campus and facilities maintenance. </p>
<p>Case in point, this is the reason why a school like Harvey Mudd towers over most of the UCs even though Mudd has no “research” budget. Amherst, Little Ivies, Claremont colleges, all of which only has undergraduate, but they have the mountain of CASH, UCs don’t. And you can see all the difference in the world between these universities.</p>
<p>Also, if you think budget cuts don’t affect research, you are wrong. Federal government is a major provider of research funds to public universities. Under the Bush administration, they cut federal basic research funding every year for 8 years. </p>
<p>The schools that bear these cuts are precisely the likes of Cal. Cal used to be on par with Princeton, Harvard, and MIT during WWII and even in the 50s and 60s. But since the Federal govt. decided to slice the research funding, Cal’s ranking has been eroded steadily, and today, Cal are no longer the direct peers of MIT/Princeton/Stanford.</p>