Good luck with your decision. I am an Iowa mom too and my daughter will be going to NEU in the Fall. When we were first starting to look at schools a friend who has family who hire a lot of STEM majors gave us a list of schools they like to hire from. Rensselaer was on the list. And the companies they were hiring for were in California. There were a lot of CA schools on the list too of course but that was one that they liked on the East coast, along with MIT.