I would just add a slightly different perspective on the subject of "how important is choosing a school for undergraduate engineering". For MANY engineering specialties, where you go as an undergrad doesn't matter much, particularly if grad school is an eventual plan (and I am a strong advocate that nowadays, most engineers should plan on an MS if they are going to practice engineering in a technical sense). For some highly specialized engineering fields, where you go as an undergrad can have a huge determination on your overall career. IMHO, mechanical, electrical, civil and to a certain extent chemical undergrad degrees can be had at any number of different places and be pretty darn good. The reason for this is that ABET accreditation provides for a general standardization of skills and coursework that needs to be taught. However, for certain specialty engineering fields, there is so much discipline-specific work you need to do as an undergrad that in order to pursue this as a profession, you will have to take at least one full year (and probably two) of undergrad elective and core courses in addition to an MS if you didn't originally get this as an undergrad. These fields include mining engineering, petroleum engineering, geological engineering, hydrogeologic-specific engineering (civil or geological), environmental (some civil programs do a great job of emphasizing this in the undergrad coursework), materials, geotech (although many civils get a good background if the school specializes), and biotech. I don't know enough about the computer engineers to know whether or not EEs can make that cross over and I confess ignorance on whether mechanicals can cross over to aeronautical/aerospace easily. Every engineer, no matter the stripe, generally gets the core classes - statics, dynamics, strength of materials, thermo, maybe fluids, possibly PChem. These are hugely important courses and they don't change from year to year. But there are many field-specific courses that are critical to the profession and do evolve over time. Just putting this out to folks with burning ambitions to be one kind of engineer or another - it CAN make a difference where you go to school and it's not a lay-up that one school will prepare you for most fields. But the one thing any engineering program will teach is problem solving skills - that is the single most valuable skill any engineer acquires and I suspect it is why SAs put so much value on an engineering education. I will also say this (based on personal observation) - if you have the foundations of engineering, no matter what the field, you can become any other type of engineer in the future if you really want it - but it will take additional course work and determination to get there.
