I wouldn't discount Columbia SEAS so quickly. It has become a very good engineering school. In general, its campus is very nice. It's a little bit small, but that makes traveling to classes easier. This would probably be the easiest for traveling since it's located in New York City.
Purdue and Georgia Tech are both public universities, so they have much larger student populations and have higher in-state populations (from Indiana and Georgia, respectively).
You may want to look at the websites for these schools to get a better picture of them.