<ol>
<li>MIT (the undisputed best engineering school)</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Olin</li>
<li>UIUC</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Carnegie Mellon</li>
<li>Rice</li>
<li>UMichigan</li>
<li>Case Western Reserve</li>
<li>Purdue (safety no matter what)</li>
</ol>
<p>Purdue class sizes may be huge but If you can get into those other schools you will probably qualify for the honors program thus smaller classes.</p>
<p>Some other suggestions would be: Berkeley, caltech, georgia-tech, JHU
Stating what kind of engineering would really narrow the list...</p>
<p>How am I biased? Just because I recommend Illinois, Princeton and Texas over Case for Engineering majors? Does that make me biased against Harvard too? I agree that Case is awesome in Biomedical Engineering, and if the OP wishes to study BME, our list would change drastically, adding schools like Case, BU, Penn, UCSD and Duke. But as an Enigneering school overall, there are several schools that are better.</p>
<p>If there is anyone 'biased' against Case engineering, it is the US News folks. They ranked Case undergrad engineering a lowly #36, and the peers gave the program a relatively low score of 3.4 ... same as Brown and Iowa State.</p>
<p>The OP didn't say which engineering field he/she is interesting in. How would you rate Case in the traditional engineering fields like Civil, Chemical, Electrical and Mechanical?</p>
<p>Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not exactly sure, but I'm heavily leaning towards EE, perhaps on the robotics side. Purdue would be a suitable safety, but how would financial aid go?</p>
<p>You should consider moving CMU upwards on the list and probably adding UC Berkeley. Maybe you should even consider military academies like US Naval Academy or US Military Academy (West Point).</p>
<p>Military academies are unarguably the best engineering schools for undergrads. The funding they receive is phenomenal and will blow even MIT out of the water.</p>
<p>It's much too late to suddenly jump into applying for military academies, however. Thanks though.</p>
<p>Alexandre, I notice you omitted Rice from the list. I first knew Rice in the context of chemical engineering and thought they had a fantastic EE program as well - don't they?</p>
<p>For schools such as UMichigan or Case Western or UIUC, are full tuition scholarships possible for out-of-state applicants? Are they even remotely close to likely?</p>
<p>I don't know much about Rice. I know Rice does have an excellent Engineering program though.</p>
<p>Yes, Case, Illinois and Michigan all give scholarships to out of state students. In the case of Michigan, you have to apply as soon as possible if you want to improve your chances of scholarships.</p>
<p>for those of you really hung up on rankings I refer you to a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article that discusses the poor reliability and even worse validity of the US News rankings. Some colleges are refusing to be reviewed. Often "peer" rankings are based on frighteningly low "Ns" ...it's mainly a way for universities to suck in students, increase tuition etc. You should visit colleges and use your own intuition, internal data and other factors to determine what is best for you. Don't just pay $40k because some college is ranked 5-10 points above another.</p>
<p>Olin is awesome. If I was interested in engineering, it'd be my 1st choice hands down. But it's a unique place. I mean, 2 dorms for the entire school. I think it's a great experience, and I mean the senior year grant thing? Can we say awesome? If anything, don't kick off olin!</p>
<p>I'm going a little off track, but the last time I was in a two-dorm environment (Boys State), one dorm (mine) stormed the other with an invading party. Does that happen at Olin? I know at MIT there's a schism, 'tween East and West.</p>