Chris Aldrich

I find it hard to believe, particularly if you're in financial need, that you'd have a full ride at UT and not have been offered anything at JHU, so double check with the JHU office of financial aid first to see what, if anything, you'd be offered.

More than anything I'd recommend at least visiting both campuses in person and taking a tour and speaking to some students and professors. Asking a question here like you have with only the three data points (two schools and one financial aid package) is not nearly enough to go on for anyone to presume to help you make one of the most influential decisions you're going to make in your life - particularly when the advice is likely to be a terrifically biased and spurious and you're unlikely to delve into the nature of the responses you're getting.

In some sense, you're comparing apples and oranges. A couple of questions you should ask, however, above and beyond the simple ranking portion of the question which most are focusing on in their answers (while the remainder seem to be a bit more biased based on their personal experiences) include:
What are the campus environments like?
How big are the schools and what kind of attention and resources will I have access to?
How big are the cities they're in and what do they offer as part of the undergraduate experience?
What happens after one or two years if you decide to change your major?
Other than the end result of the degree, what do you want out of a college experience?
Are you looking for more diversity or less in terms of culture, religion, etc.?
What are your other interests outside of academics and are those interests actively represented or possible at the school you want to attend? (As an example, are you a musician and want to take classes or have practice time at a college's sister conservatory - perhaps you could get a dual degree? or are there a variety of other music outlets available like bands, symphonies, orchestras, music groups, etc.?)

UT is a humongous place, while Hopkins is significantly smaller, so at UT you're much more likely to be treated like just another number, even within the electrical engineering department. At Hopkins your classes are guaranteed to be much smaller and more intimate which gives you far more access to your professors - particularly when you may need recommendations down the road.

Statistically, if you're planning on going to graduate school, you'll have far more resources for doing research as an undergraduate at Hopkins, which will give you more preparation and a stronger case when you apply. Hopkins excels in undergraduate research experience in part because of its philosophy but also because it gets almost twice the government funding than even the next closest competitor. Additional resources like the proximity of the Applied Physics Lab and the Space Telescope Science Institute (which managed projects like the Hubble Telescope) will give you additional opportunities related to your field while you're in school.

If you do want to play the simple ranking game, keep in mind that only about a third of your course work as an undergraduate will be in the EE department. How highly ranked are all the other programs and departments like mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, English, and others from which the remainder of your coursework will come? Again, what will things look like if you decide to change major part way through?

[Disclosure: I'm an alum of Johns Hopkins class of 1996 with degrees in both biomedical engineering and electrical engineering. I've been both very active on the Hopkins Society of Engineering Alumni board as well as the board that oversees the University's larger Alumni Association. I'm happy to give you more information about Hopkins, and can be easily found via a variety of social media outlets.]

Response to JHU's academic freedom statement created by the Task Force on Academic Freedom:

Paragraph 5 of the statement beginning: "Academic freedom also entails academic responsibility." repeats itself unnecessarily in almost exact language with the following two sentences which should be combined into one:

"Faculty who express their personal views on controversial subjects in the classroom must make it clear that students may disagree with those views."

is followed by an intervening sentence, and then essentially repeated in the final sentence of the paragraph:

"Professors who express their personal views on a contested issue must make it clear that students may disagree with those views without penalty."

Also from a grammatical standpoint, while the issue at hand is academic freedom, which we can all agree is important, it is not so important that a major research university should capitalize it unnecessarily in a document like this. Except in the cases where it starts a sentence (and then only the 'A' in academic freedom should be capitalized), or perhaps in the main title which appears in all caps, academic freedom should not be capitalized anywhere in the document.

From a semantic and administrative standpoint, while it's lovely that we have such a statement, it really doesn't do much to actually institute any actual mechanisms to prevent administrators or professors from abusing the academic freedoms of others in the community. The general concepts stated here are, to a great extent, already living within our community; the real step would have been in going further spelling out something further. Where are the broad guidelines for actually instituting and safeguarding these freedoms? In essence, we've written a lovely preamble to a constitution, but forgotten to include the actual articles.