A lot of the schools you mentioned- like NYU and Michigan- have extremely strong regional reputations that make them competitive with- or sometimes even superior to- schools in the Top Five. When I was in Chicago three years ago, a guy from Michigan would usually beat out a guy from Princeton for a job in trading, all other things being equal.
Likewise, someone from NYU gives folks from Stanford and U. Chicago a run for their money here in New York.
That said, once you get about 500 miles away from both schools, they start to lose their brand names. Here in NYC, people call Michigan one of the better state schools, and in Chicago, many people believe that NYU is a public school (and have never even heard of top-ten-ranked Baruch).
The only schools with truly consistent national brand names are a handful of the Ivies,
CMU, MIT, U. Chicago, Stanford, and Berkeley- not to mention LSE, Oxford, Cambridge, and a trend towards brand-name status for IIM and IIT (India, not Chicago).
So the question is where do you want to work and what do you want to do when you graduate?
New York+Greenwich: Structured Finance, Exotics trading, some market-making (more of a focus on OTC), some algorithmic trading. Some hedge funds.
Chicago: Market-making on the three big exchanges, algorithmic trading, prop shops, and a few hedge funds.
Boston: Investment Management.
Finally, I would note that you may get a better education at a private school than a state school. I was an engineering student at UIUC for four years and decided to go back over Differential Equations by downloading some courses from MIT's Open Course project. The first odd thing that I noticed was that I could actually understand the professor's English most of the time. The second thing I noticed was that he seemed to actually enjoy teaching the class and knew how to help students understand some of the concepts. You don't always get that at a state school math/hard science/engineering program, and there's a lot more self-study. Please do your DD.
