Cornell is a great Ivy for Engineering. The nice thing about a lot of the top private schools with large endowments, at least as far as the Ivy's are concerned, is that they have need blind admissions and will make sure if you are accepted that you get a financial aid package that will allow you to attend.
Well, I can say it has a great engineering program. But I'm not sure speaking from experience that is was "better" than some of the UC's. But I haven't attended other UC's to compare first hand. Only from comparing notes with other friends that have 🙂 From a price perspective, it was much more expensive.
The challenge that I had there was finding decent projects, because at the time you didn't have large corporation sponsors backing a lot of projects. I've told things have changed recently.
