+1 for the social scene: the majority of the jobs you'll get will be through your friends that you make at university, not because you have a fancy name on your resume. Being surrounded by creative, smart people and forming good relationships with them is easily just as important as learning engineering concepts and getting good grades. Since engineers are known to drink a lot, the party scene is not something to discount since it's quite a bit easier to form bonds with people over drinking games than over class projects.
If you're looking for lower cost, there are a number of universities with good engineering programs in Canada such as McGill, Queens, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo that are fairly close to New York state. They're all publicly funded and so even paying the international student rate is often cheaper than private universities in the USA like MIT.
