>As a high-school junior, I'm swimming in the sea of college
    solicitations propaganda. I received a 222 (99th percentile) on my
    PSAT test, so I assume I'm probably a candidate for the better
    colleges. I'm trying to weed out the colleges that, while they claim
    they're a good engineering college (as almost all of them do), are
    pretty worthless.

There's a very wide range of "not worthless" when it comes to EE.  "Good"
undergrad EE programs tend to be very theoretical, and not much in the way
of "how to build useful devices with a PIC microcontroller."  Theory is
good, but you can miss out on practice as well.  In my (Ivy league) EE
program, we learned how the internals of a 555 timer worked.  The class
that learned how to make neat circuits with a 555 was a CHEMISTRY class
about lab instrumentation (they got to use Lancaster's "cookbooks" for
texts!)


    At the risk of starting a flame war, which schools do y'all think are
    the best for electrical engineering, with a possibility for aerospace
    engineering (I'm interested in designing aerial robots and avionics
    for a living :^) )?

A lot of EE is "support engineering" - you do an awful lot of "engineering"
based on not very much in the way of education.  A "good EE" program is
more likely to prepare you for EE-specific things like chip design, a
masters degree in EE, or teaching EE.  If you're really interested in
aerial robots and avionics, I would start looking for the best schools in
aerospace engineering, which are highly likely to have "good enough" EE
programs alongside.

I'll second the idea that getting involved in projects outside the
classrooms is particularly important.  Either at school, or for your summer
jobs (look for summer jobs that are in your career path, not the ones that
are most convenient or pay best...)

BillW "All that calculus, wasted on a software engineer."

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