It can matter financially with tuition if you enter a college within your state of residency.
Your approach to beginning a college education in Engineering shoud be toward preparing you for a 40 year career in a branch of the Engineering discipline you choose to pursue, not for your initial employment upon graduation. After your Freshman or Sophomore year you may even change your mind on that discipline.
I answer as someone who started graduate school at a "top ten" university, saw what it meant, and decided not to continue graduate school.
There are some things that matter, and many things that don't. The name of the school doesn't matter. The specifics of the curriculum don't matter. It doesn't matter if the university has "the best" program for a specific sub-discipline (in EE, for example, signal processing or circuit design). It doesn't matter how many students the university has. In fact, most of the details of the university don't really matter that much.
What does matter is whether or not local employers recognize your university. Unless you want to land in a specific company in Silicon Valley, chances are that the companies you will apply to work for will not only know the university, they will come to the university to recruit. And after your first job, it's not going to matter so much where you went to school because what will be of most interest will be your most recent experience.
What does matter is your GPA. While having a 4.0 at a community college doesn't mean as much as a 4.0 from, say, Stanford University, it is still one of the main things that will attract employers to your resume. So a 4.0 in engineering from a community college will be looked at before a 3.2 from the nearest state university.
What does matter is whether or not you learn useful skills, and even more so whether or not you learn how to apply engineering principles to new problems. If you can get those from a community college, that will matter more than if you managed to get in to a top tier school and graduate with a high GPA but not actually come out with the desired skills.
What does matter is that the school can be a launching pad into a career. Bigger, more expensive universities advertise that they are better at that, but that is not really the whole truth. A local state university can be just as effective a launch pad into a career as a bigger university -- and actually a better one if you are looking to be hired at a company closer to home.
One of the biggest things that you should be considering at this point is "where do I get the best education *for my money*." Factor cost into the equation, because student loan debt is (regrettably) not dischargeable through bankruptcy. If you go into debt, it will follow you until it is paid off. Is $10,000 per semester really worth it compared to $2,000 per semester, especially when either one will get you the same kind of job at the same pay scale?
Think about it.
The prestige will make your resume more attractive when trying to get an interview for your first job. After that it really doesn't matter all that much. Once you get the interview, your personality and technical knowledge will dominate. If you came from MIT but seem like a jerk or don't know your stuff, you'll still fail the interview. And conversely, if you came from Joe-Shmo-U and have a brilliant personality and know your stuff inside and out, you'll get hired in a second. If you already have work experience(at least 2 years) they'll look at that primarily when deciding whether to bring you in for an interview.
If you want to learn, you can do that at almost any college. We used to have a joke that said when asking certain questions, the instructor will say "I can't tell you that. You have to go to MIT for that answer". Typically, at the better colleges you can't make it through and learn nothing. But you can do this at other colleges.
Some colleges focus the training on the practitioner side. Some universities focus the training on the research and cutting edge technologies. So it depends on where you see yourself from between 5 to years after graduation with the bachelor's degree. Please note that you may need to continue your education to prevent your skills from becoming obsolete 15 to 20 years later.
mostly it doesn't matter.
but a few things matter a little, and, for chemical, other chemical engineers will respect and notice if you came from one of the top CE schools.
so,, here is that list
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandre...
Not really.
Chemical for my main choice
