Growing up, there were a few aspiring engineers in my area that actually turned down MIT for RPI. At the time, there were several reasons for this which may or may not still be valid today one of the main ones was that it was truly an undergrad driven “hard core” engineering school. Going to school in Troy, NY didn’t phase them as similar post-industrial towns were typical in the northeast at the time. Despite it’s reputation for extreme rigor there doesn’t appear to be a vector calculus requirement in the materials curriculum there. I’m not sure what to think of that, but I found it interesting.