<p>Not living in the US for 20 years or so, I don’t feel able to rate state schools, other than the UC system which we probably cannot afford and appears to vary from campus to campus. I am skeptical about assigning too much weight to magazine rankings and most other charts rank research, which may or may not affect quality of undergraduate education. Anybody know of any other way to get information on state universities? Is it fair to say if they are in the top 100 of US News they should be ok? Should one look at how big they are? Are there areas of the country or specific states that are known to have inferior state schools? Another aspect that I find difficult is to tell if a particular school is moving up or down on the excellence scale. I know I can look at SAT scores, but I’m not sure how to apply that to just the engineering department of a school. I feel like I would know more if I had been living in America.</p>