<p>Here is my impression, as an RPI educated engineer on the West Coast: Stevens has great regional appeal if you are in the NY Metro area. Cost of living is high there so starting salaries will also be high. The vast majority of people in this country will not move to the NY metro area under any circumstance; there are plenty of great colleges close to NYC (and some of the best HS) where industries can hire locally.</p>
<p>A Stevens degree on a resume, out here in Seattle, will be put near the bottom of the pile unless you have great experience and recommendations to go along with it. It will not be considered better than Rutgers and definitely considered below UW. Cornell, on the other hand, will put you on top of the pile, along with Stanford and Berkeley grads. It has national and worldwide cache that the others lack.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, you have nothing but good choices. Stevens vs. Cornell, if those are your final two choices, are very different experiences and at very different prices. At Stevens, you would be surrounded by other pre-professional engineering students in an urban environment. At Cornell, you would be surrounded by multi-discipline Cornell students in a pretty (but somewhat depressed) upstate NY town. The engineering curriculum is hard enough that the comfort of the seating in the library could be the deciding factor. If seeing people pay for groceries with an EBT card is a deal killer for you, Ithaca doesn’t really have wealthy neighborhoods. When I was a student in Troy, NY, I volunteered in the projects - it’s all perspective.</p>
<p>By the way, I did some design work for Ithaco Space Systems in, you guessed it, Ithaca, NY. [Attitude</a> Control](<a href=“http://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff1997/t2.html]Attitude”>Attitude Control | NASA Spinoff) They have some pretty smart Cornell engineering grads.</p>