I have a few comments:
[ul]
[li]Don’t get so wrapped up in rankings. The drawbacks to the various ranking methodologies have been discussed ad nauseum on this site (and many others), so I won’t reiterate them, but the short version is that they are really only valid in the sense that they sort schools and programs into tiers. #1 vs. #9 is a pretty insignificant difference.[/li]
[li]Computational engineering is not a new field, so I am not sure I would describe it as up and coming. In fact, computational engineering as a field was the primary reason for the development of digital computers in the first place and really started as a field of its own in the 1940s.[/li]
[li]The general idea behind a computational engineering degree is that a student would learn a combination of math and computer science such that they can create programs that computationally solve the various partial differential equations that govern nature, so it would basically be a degree built on solving complex math problems on a computer. This is a valuable skill that is broadly applicable to many engineering fields. It is also something that seems a little fishy to me in that I wonder if it leaves the student with enough of a background in any single engineering discipline to start working there without further field-specific training.[/li]
[li]Most modern engineering and physics curricula include at least one course on numerical methods, which is the basis for computational engineering. In that sense, most modern engineering students have exposure to that material as well as context based on their major field of study. Further specialization in computational methods generally occurs in graduate school or on the job.[/li]
[li]All undergraduate engineering programs are taught by the same professors as their graduate programs (provided one exists).[/li]
[li]Do not make choices now on the assumption you will be getting any kind of graduate degree. There is no way for you to make an informed decision on graduate school at this point, especially a PhD, which is a dramatically larger commitment than an MS (or a BS/MS combined, for that matter).[/li]
[li]If you do end up eventually pursuing a PhD, it is not always a great idea to attend the same school as where you earned your BS. There are some instances where that is a good idea, but there are others where it is not. At any rate, when you do get a few years of studies under your belt, if you still want to get a PhD, you should pick your program based on the research fit and reputation within that research field, not based on some list of rankings.[/li]
[li]I don’t know which major you should pick. That’s largely a personal choice. Either one should give you plenty of career options. Based on what you have said so far, I would lean toward aerospace engineering and then making sure you take a numerical methods course and take other computational engineering courses on offer such as computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, etc.[/li][/ul]
EDIT: In retrospect, that was more than a few, but I think they are important points.