Olin College of Engineering has done a lot of innovation in developing an engineering curriculum that is better targeted to developing the skills engineers really need today. One of the ways this is manifested is getting kids involved in doing meaningful projects right out of the gate, rather than having to survive a two year “math/science death march” of lecture classes and endless problem sets before getting the chance to actually build anything. If that sounds appealing to you, then I’d take an especially hard look at UICU – they worked closely with Olin in revising their engineering curriculum over the last few years. I’m not exactly sure what that looks like in practice, but I would suggest it would be worth learning more about given your current position.
Also, each kid’s mileage will, of course, vary, but I was actually just talking to a parent tonight at a high school function whose son is a very unhappy freshman trying to pursue engineering at Purdue. The classes are enormous (probably true at every school on your list, actually), and there’s a very competitive, uncollaborative culture, in his experience. He says everyone’s concerned about being one of the one’s weeded in the big weeder classes and hence unwilling to help one another. He’s thinking hard about transferring. That’s only one data point, of course, and I’m sure there are other parents on this board who could probably chime in with anecdotes that are diametrically opposed. Also, he’s only a freshman, and plenty of kids struggle their first year in college, and engineering is not an easy road.
That being said, I wonder if there’s any way of figuring out what percentage of kids that enter the schools you’re considering intending to be engineering majors actually stick it out. I think that would be a very interesting number to know.