My experience as an undergrad in the AE department was thus: you're irrelevant to the professors working on grant projects, and if you're not PHD material well just do your problem sets, finish your degree, then get the hell out. Throw in the absolutely awful adminstrative side, and its an exercise in teaching students how not to take ownership. It seems geared to training worker bees for Big Engineering, and identiying the few suitable for Big Academia.

Then again, its probably changed a lot in the last decade. I started school just after the last tech bubble popped.