<p>Perhaps parents with kids in other schools can weigh in here.</p>
<p>Take Carnegie Mellon, RPI, CalTech, Cornell Engineering, etc. In terms of course load, difficulty of material, quality of instruction, resulting preparedness, etc. are there, in fact, tangible differences between top engineering schools? I see my kid's PSETs and am blown away by the level of the material, but for all I know it's that way now at all top schools.</p>
<p>Generally there doesn't seem to be too much difference in the introductory course material, which makes sense: 8.01/8.012 physics has been around forever, and taking it at MIT/Caltech/etc doesn't make you stand out. </p>
<p>But as you move on through the undergrad degree and start specializing in sub-disciplines, some schools hold very powerful advantages, mainly due to strong graduate programs. So while going to MIT in general might not be better than Caltech, there are definetely sub-fields of majors that if you were to concentrate in at MIT you would get far better training than anywhere else (and vice versa for Caltech, CMU, etc etc).</p>
<p>I don't have friends at other top tech schools, but I can weigh in regarding a couple other top schools. My boyfriend goes to Notre Dame, and for a while he didn't believe that our work was actually harder; then we compared our Calc 3 and Chemistry psets (18.02 and 5.112, in MIT speak) on a visit and his reaction, verbatim: "I would have given up on question 1." And he's a math major and has always been better at chemistry than me.</p>
<p>Similar stories with friends at UMich, where a lot of kids from my high school went- I can't speak for differences among tech schools specifically, but even compared to other all around fantastic colleges, MIT is freaking hard.</p>
<p>Also, another very cool aspect of MIT is their UROP, which makes research opportunities much more accessible to undergrads.</p>
<p>Ducktape, that's exactly the type of feedback I was looking for.</p>