<p>By "Ivy Engineer", I'm assuming the schools of Penn, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale, while excluding Dartmouth and Brown since they take a liberal arts approach to engineering and also excluding Cornell and Princeton since they have "prestigious" engineering programs.</p>
<p>My answer is: if you <em>only</em> want to be an engineer, then going to UIUC, Penn State, would be good enough. It'll save you a lot of money. But if you're not sure, then the Ivy will give you more flexibility and make you more appealing to non-engineering quantitative jobs, especially fiancial services. So it depends on what your idea of a career is.</p>
<p>I shoud also say that despite ranked "only" 27th by USNEWS, Penn and Columbia engineers do not have trouble finding engineering jobs (for those who might think otherwise). At Penn, the engineering career fair had 80 recruiting companies for a graduating class of about 350-425 people. I think this is a decent number. On the other hand, Penn engineers can also attend the career fairs of the Wharton school or Penn's college, both of which have a number of prestigious companies recruiting on campus.</p>
<p>Harvard and Yale both have small engineering programs, but I heard they are both of good quality. Yale, I think, is actually quite prestigous in Mechanical engineering. I also agree with Sakky that a rank of around 30 or even 50 for engineering in the USNWR magazine is nothing to look down on. </p>
<p>I am entirely unfamiliar with Dartmouth and Brown's undergraduate engineering programs. I would guess that even fewer people from those programs would consider an engineering career, but that is not because they are not capable of it.</p>
<p>Another way to look at it (from a less personal perspective), is that the people at Ivy engineering undergraduate are of higher "academic aptitude" than those at distinguished state engineering schools. The average SAT for Penn Engineering was 1460, which is notably higher than those at UIUC, Penn State, and VA Tech, and I bet is still higher than those UMichigan, and even UC Berkeley. If you believe that it is the person and not the college that determins future success, then the IVY engineer has the advantage.</p>