FWIW, (and I have posted this a few times now) in my tech co with grads from CMU, NYU, BU and other private colleges, the 3 essential “geniuses” in the company are all grads of 3 different SUNY schools.
Also, a recent intern of ours was just accepted to CMU CS, largely on the strength of his portfolio of programming, hardware hacking and 3D rendering he submitted. He wasn’t very strong in ECs either as he was always at his PC. Do you have something like that you could put together?