As @CaliDad2020 said, study abroad can be challenging. My son was told at several schools famous for study abroad “engineering is different.” That meant you had to jump through serious hoop and you would only be doing gen ed classes overseas. One very notable exception is WPI. They have a very robust program where students have the opportunity to participate in real engineering projects all over the world. It’s more like an internship abroad. It’s pretty unique and well worth looking into if that’s important to you.
It’s been a long week here in @boneh3ad land, so sorry I am chiming in very late here. Hopefully this post doesn’t get too rambly and is helpful. Here is my take on program quality: rankings, big vs. small, reputation, etc.
Rankings
There are no rankings of which I am aware that are not subjective in some way. Most try to be quantitative, but at the end of the day, they all end up comparing apples to oranges to some degree so you have to use them as, at best, a rough guide. It’s true that the most popular rankings, USNWR, based the undergraduate rankings solely on reputation. I’d argue, however, that there aren’t a whole lot of other quantifiable factors that set the undergraduate programs apart given that the curricula are largely dictated by ABET. The only other things that I can think of immediately would be dollars spent per student and employer reputation. Otherwise, it would be largely subjective things like “best facilities”. I think those rankings have exceptionally limited use, in other words.
The graduate rankings are more… complex. They try to factor in more things, but I’d argue most of them are actually more applicable to the undergraduate programs. If you are searching for somewhere to do your PhD, you shouldn’t care that much about the overall engineering reputation, and even the departmental reputation doesn’t matter as much as the strength of subspecialties within departments. For example, if you want to do high-speed aerodynamics for a PhD, it doesn’t matter that MIT is ranked number 2 for aerospace engineering because they don’t even do high-speed aerodynamics there. In other words, I’d actually argue that the graduate rankings are at least as relevant at ranking the undergraduate programs as the undergraduate rankings are, if not more relevant. After all, the employer scores and other hard data won’t change much, and neither will the reputation score.
Additionally, graduate programs have a pretty big effect on undergraduate programs. They provide research opportunities for undergraduates. The faculty use their research experience to inform their teaching. A broader array of research labs typically correlates with a broader array of technical electives since the faculty teach courses relevant to their research specialty.
That said, rankings are far from a panacea and still primarily represent an institutions reputation. They have effectively nothing to say of the quality of teaching or undergraduate experience. It’s a lot more about the amount of money and expertise in the departments.
Reputation
Reputation does play a role in engineering, though far less than what you’d see in a field like business. Schools with a better reputation are going to have a larger recruiting footprint because companies are going to be more likely to spend money to recruit at a far away school if that school has the reputation for producing excellent engineers. A school with less of a national brand is going to have a more regional footprint. That is going to affect who is at the career fairs actively recruiting more than anything else.
Reputation plays a much more role, a dominant one, when looking at many non-traditional jobs filled by engineers. Banking, consulting, and other positions that are really business positions being filled by engineers with good quantitative skills are going to be much more uptight about institutional reputation. You probably won’t be getting a job at Goldman-Sachs from WPI, but Boeing sure will hire that WPI grad.
Institution size
Large schools are pretty oft-derided on College Confidential as a whole (though perhaps less so on the engineering boards), but there are some real, tangible advantages. For one, size affects recruiting in a similar manner to reputation. A company is more likely to recruit from a far away university if that university has a large pool of graduates to recruit. A larger program is going to tend to have a larger recruiting footprint for that reason.
Additionally, large departments not only have more students, but also more faculty (generally). More faculty means there is likely a wider range of research areas. Since faculty develop and teach courses based on their research specialties, this means large departments typically have a broader array of technical electives available to students. So yes, ABET sets the minimum bar, but they have absolutely no control over electives. More faculty also means a wider range of options for undergraduate research for students interested in these things.
Large programs are also more likely to have big, expensive labs dedicated to undergraduate courses/learning. That’s simply an issue of cost effectiveness. A large student machine shop costs the same whether it expects to provide learning experiences to 20 students per year or 200, so the larger program with a larger pool of tuition and research overhead money is going to be more likely to be able to afford such facilities.
Small schools have their own set of advantages, chiefly in the form of smaller class sizes and feeling less like simply a number. You can get personal attention at large programs (I always make time to talk to my students when possible) but you will have to go out and seek it. At a small program, you are more likely to get that by default.
Final thoughts
You really need to determine what is important to you. Ultimately, you are going to get the best education at the school that fits your own priorities and lifestyle reasonably well. If you aren’t happy there, you aren’t going to be very motivated to work hard. If you don’t have the level of personal attention you want or breadth of opportunity you want, you are going to be stunted. You have to come up with the criteria that work best for you as an individual and try to match them as best you can. The good news is that there are likely a number of schools out there that will fill all those needs (not just one), so you just have to put in the thought and then go looking.
It also depends on what type of student/engineer you are. My son wanted a program that was more rounded as he felt he had more interests that just engineering. He was accepted to RPI but felt it was just too focused on engineering for him.
So if you have interests in other classes you want to see if the curriculum will let you take them so compare how flexible their curriculum is.
Also, my son’s engineering school was very motivated that engineers should do a study abroad. They bent over backwards to help students get that semester in. My son went to New Zealand for his. A unforgettable experience for him.