As others have mentioned, it’s super important to figure out the budget before building out a college list. Talk to your family and have them run the Net Price Calculators on the websites of colleges that you’re interested in. If the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) from the college is affordable, then it remains a contender. If not, you need to find schools where you will get merit aid to help bring the costs down.
Georgia Tech & UT-Austin are very difficult admits for anyone who is not an automatic admit (Texas residents in the top 6% of their class for UT).
Make sure that any college you’re looking to attend for engineering is ABET accredited, as most employers only want to hire engineers who have a degree from an ABET-accredited school. You can find accredited schools here (and note that it can vary by specialty, i.e. accredited in mechanical engineering but not chemical engineering, for instance).
- University at Buffalo
- SUNY Binghamton
- SUNY New Paltz
- SUNY Oswego (electrical & computer engineering; software engineering only)
- Stony Brook
- SUNY Environmental Science & Forestry (paper engineering only)
- SUNY Maritime
- CUNY City College
- CUNY Staten Island
- SUNY Polytechnic
Not all of these schools offer every engineering specialty, so you’d want to make sure the specialties you are interested are offered at the campuses that interest you. The ABET search tool can also be used to narrow down the list to schools that offer the fields of engineering you’re interested in. If you share what types of engineering you’re interested in, that can also help people in offering suggestions of possible schools to consider.