<p>I can’t tell you about the other universities, they are all good choices, but I can answer questions about Illinois Tech as I have been a professor in physics here for 30 years and two of my children have attended the university.</p>
<p>The location is great, my daughter likes to roam about the city and there are two elevated train lines on campus that can get you anywhere. Lots of things to do off campus as well as on.</p>
<p>The academics are tough. We are a tech school and so our expectations for our students are much the same as CMU, RPI, or Case Western (among others). The students run a yearly survey and the faculty and academics are uniformly highly rated. Since we are a small university (2,800 undergraduates, 5,000 graduate students) there is a good chance of getting to know your professors, particularly in the Math Department.</p>
<p>IIT is well known to employers and our graduates do well in placement (we just received a memo from the career center that placement rates for 2013 were 92% which includes graduate school of course) and in salary (just search on “Engineering Schools by salary potential”). Anecdotally, my son graduated with a Computer Engineering degree in 2010 at the height of the recession and found a great job within a month through contacts made as an undergraduate. For graduate school, I can speak best about the physics majors and our students get into highly selective Ph.D. programs regularly and are well prepared in comparison to students from other programs.</p>
<p>Your final concern was about bureaucracy. This is a concern for the upper administration and the yearly student survey is mostly about how administrative offices interact with students. This has been improving since the university takes the survey results seriously and makes changes based on them. With a bit of good advice, students can navigate these offices smoothly. Faculty are always willing to help.</p>
<p>Feel free to ask me additional questions and good luck on your decision.</p>