I can’t speak to all of them, because we only vetted some of them for serious consideration. Of those, I’d say Cal Poly, Utah, Iowa State and Case all came off as collaborative. Even though Cal Poly grades notoriously hard (there was a 4.0 in my son’s class and it had been 10 years since the last one), students all work together.
My son is a first year MSE major at Cal, and he loves it. He feels that there is a collaborative atmosphere in both materials and mechanical engineering; he thinks the students in both of these majors are friendly and fun. MSE is an extremely small major so it can have more of a close knit feeling almost like going to a smaller school, which some students enjoy. He feels that there’s more of a negatively competitive atmosphere among students in the EECS major (which is a very large major), but that is just his impression. (My son is taking an EECS course and one of his roommates is EECS.)
Some of the clubs have competitive entry simply because a lot of students want to join them, but he didn’t feel that the process of applying was too stressful (he applied to two clubs and was accepted to both). Other engineering clubs are non competitive and accept everyone.
Edited to add: From the schools on your list, my son also really liked UC Davis, Cal Poly, and Minnesota. (He also really liked Oregon State.) He felt that he would have been happy at any of those schools.
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CS 61A or 61B? Could there be significant numbers of L&S CS hopeful students who were admitted having not pre declared L&S CS and therefore must go through competitive admission to the major? (However, these courses do not use competitive grading.)
He is taking EECS 16A (and will be in 16B in the spring), because he’s interested in electrical engineering. He likes the class, the teaching staff, and he has plenty of friends in EECS. The grading is not competitive (that is, it’s not graded on a curve). The EECS department also works hard to make the students’ experience more collaborative; they have a 1 unit course that goes along with 16A in which students are placed in study groups.
But he does have the impression that there is a stressful competitive edge to the atmosphere in EECS, that he does not feel is present in MSE or mech E. Perhaps this has something to do with the size or popularity of the major. He thinks that if Cal engineering in general has a reputation for being competitive in a negative way, it might be because of the experience of some students in EECS. Outside of EECS he feels that Cal engineering has a positive collaborative feeling.
Based on upper division EE and CS course enrollment, CS is by far the more popular part of the major, although all take EE 16A and 16B (and the lower division CS courses). Perhaps the high admission selectivity of the major due to the popularity of CS unintentionally selected for students who were the most competitive and driven in high school, continuing their habits in college?
It’s possible that EECS selects for the most competitive students. I also wonder if some students are attracted to EECS because it’s considered an elite program and has the reputation that its students make a lot of money.
My son is on the electric race car team, and the majority of students on that team are either mech E or EECS (mostly students interested in EE, but there are also CS focused EECS majors on the autonomous subteam, I believe). So he hangs out with people in these majors of all class levels, including a few graduate students. But he himself is just a first year student, so his impressions should be taken with a big grain of salt 
Anyway, this thread isn’t about EECS majors, the OP wanted to know about MSE specifically. So… I was just trying to give my son’s impressions of his first year experience so far as an MSE major. It’s been very positive and he loves it!
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Thank you for your helpful replies. That is some great context. My son, for now at least, seems pretty committed to doing MSE for college and has been for some time now. It was a primary criterion to rule colleges in or out as far as where to apply. I liked Oregon State as well but there was no MSE major available there, so he didn’t apply. Your son’s observation about some of the EECS students is quite valuable. I can see how what might be true for a subset of students in one prominent, large engineering department may not be reflective of other departments of the college as a whole. Another factor I had brought up earlier about the hard-rank based grading in the lower level classes may have been a legacy from decades ago. I noticed you can pull the grade distributions for these classes at Cal online now and based on per class per semester data that type of grading appears to no longer be effect or is not nearly as strict as it used to be at least for the classes I remember.
It’s great and imo a sign of a relatively inclusive atmosphere that your son was able to get into EE and MECHE dominated clubs right away as a freshman MSE major. Perhaps the ultra-competitive clubs thing is another primarily CS issue.
There are many good reasons for a 1st year student not to join a research lab, but has your son noted whether this seems to be an issue for second year and above students that desire it in this department?
For the CA schools as others pointed out above we won’t find out whether any of this matters until the end of March. There is not a small chance of going 0 for CA so obsessions over Cal vs CalPoly vs Davis vs Riverside vs Minnesota for example are premature. My son has been accepted at many of his OOS options, they are all in play financially, some compete favorably with CalPoly in-state and we will know the status of most or all of the rest in the next couple of months. So we are making plans to visit at least some of the OOS acceptances in the next couple of months before we know the March results. What provoked this thread is that time for making a decision feels like it is shrinking rapidly and will accelerate when we reach April. I also think the information you have given me about your son’s early experience at Cal MSE vs EECS is something that will not necessarily be obvious from a campus visit.
Already, when we get down to the nitty gritty of curriculum and classes offered and required there are significant differences between these institutions even though they are all ABET accredited. For example, Cal, CalPoly, Washington St., perhaps Iowa state and the private schools, compare favorably vs the others (IMO) because they all give exposure to at least one core class in the major in the first year. Another aspect we are considering is that MSE is a very broad discipline, I think you are better off in a larger department to get broader exposure to more of the field. Although relative to other engineering departments MSE always tends to be small, some in fact may be too small (looking at you Davis, Riverside, the reason Merced was not applied to), offering limited upper division electives for undergrads or a very narrow a department focus. And yet another aspect is major pre-reqs some programs (i.e. Cal, Minnesota) require modern physics, some (i.e. UCLA, CalPoly) don’t. So, does this imply the upper division MSE classes cover content to different levels of depth at the different schools? Even the core math classes required in different departments seem to have some variance beyond 1 variable Calc. Sorry for the rant about things you already know, it’s just a fair amount of information to integrate in addition to the more generic college stuff like housing etc… If you think some of this stuff is minutia that is not really worth considering in the grander scheme of things, I would welcome the counterpoint.
If the student has ELC or “statewide top 9%”, then a shutout at UCs applied to could result in admission to UC Merced, which does have ABET-accredited materials engineering.
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My son is busy with the team and also in the orchestra, so he didn’t seek out research this year. But from the stories he tells me, it sounds like the first year students that he knows that DID want to get involved in research have been able to get involved to the extent they desire, and the projects they are working on sound interesting.
He also had positive things to say about the advising in the Cal engineering school; it sounds like engineering advising is very accessible and helpful, compared to his friends’ experiences with L&S advising. The accessibility of joint majors / double majors can also be a plus for someone in MSE which is by nature relatively interdisciplinary. A fairly high percentage of the MSE majors pursue joint or double majors.
One thing to note when comparing schools is that some schools’ engineering majors have a little more space in the curriculum for electives, even though they all cover roughly the same material. This was also a factor in my son’s decision. It can be helpful to plot out the four year curriculum for each school, given what your son would be coming in with (APs / DE credit etc).
Finally, among the materials science programs, I think Cal Poly is somewhat of an outlier not just because of the undergraduate focus of the school, but because the program in this major is so hands-on from day one. If your son hasn’t visited Cal Poly yet, I would suggest that he plan a visit with the department to get a sense of what they do there, since the hands on experience is on a whole different level than many of the other schools. Note that the Cal Poly MATE department is an easier admit than many other Cal Poly majors, so a strong student considering the various UCs that you listed should have a decent chance of admission to this major. Worth a visit 
CoE advising is a less difficult problem than L&S advising, due to the smaller number of majors in the CoE which have significant overlap in lower division requirements. An L&S advisor may encounter a student who is undecided between political economy, physics, and art practice or some other combination of majors with no overlap, and possibly in their third or fourth semester having taken too few of the possible majors’ prerequisites.
Maybe it also helps that the COE as a whole is relatively small compared to L&S? He’s seen his advisor several times so far, it sounds easy to get appointment times and she’s also responsive to emails. Not the same story for his friends in L&S.
You have probably already seen the Cal Poly flowchart, but if not, I linked it below.
The interesting thing about Cal Poly is that Materials is probably the least competitive major to get into in the CENG. It says nothing whatsoever about the quality. It’s a great program. It’s just about popularity.
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For those changing major within the CPSLO College of Engineering, materials, manufacturing, and general engineering are the three majors with a 2.000 GPA requirement. Other majors have higher GPA requirements. See https://eadvise.calpoly.edu/changing-majors/within-the-college-of-engineering
In general, admission selectivity of a major (whether frosh entry, transfer entry, declaration of major, or change of major) is mainly based on popularity of the major relative to the instructional capacity of the major.
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Apply to the Honors Program. We were told Honors students get first dibs at research.
Regarding RPI, I’d say it aspires to world-level status in certain aspects of engineering. This may represent its distinguishing characteristic.
Yes we have taken a peak that as well as what is offered for the upper level electives. A future issue with Cal Poly is that in between the 2 nd and 3rd year the university will be switching from quarters to semesters because of an ill-advised (IMO) mandate from the CSU head office Cal Poly-Pomona already did this transition, so we really have no idea what the last 2 years will look like, particularly in MATE for which there is no equivalent program at Cal Poly Pomona. I think the best strategy for students is to do everything possible to get the prerequisites courses done before the switch to semesters. It might be particularly worthwhile to use that short summer + 1st fall semester to do a co-op if you can get one then. Although a minor issue I suppose, I’m not really a fan of universities with no library which Cal Poly will be during the next 2 years. Even with these annoyances, Cal Poly will likely be high on my kid’s list should the acceptance come through.
I think the thing with materials is that even with demand being low relative to instructional capacity, admissions likelihood is going to depend how you stack up vs the applicant pool. With a small applicant pool, in an engineering major that is less well known I suspect there is more variance in the strength of the applicant pool year-to-year than a larger discipline like mechanical. For all I know the applicant pool for materials is if anything in some or all years stronger than say for mechanical. I believe the admission statistics (i.e. incoming GPA) for individual departments at Cal Poly are not publicly known. According to the materials department at Iowa St. for example, half of the students are in the honors college (overall, I think this is a good thing) so it might be that while it is a small corner of the engineering college, better students may be over-represented relative to the rest of the engineering college (again, overall a positive in my view if that is true). At the end of the day, the only thing you can do is apply and see how it shakes out.
Yes, despite battling essay fatigue my kid is doing this for at least a couple of places where the honors program seems worthwhile.
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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.
Yes, RPI’s math requirements for materials science and engineering appear to be less extensive than those for its programs in subfields such as mechanical, aerospace and nuclear engineering.