emeraldvlly:
What kind of engineering does your son have in mind? It really makes a big difference in deciding where to go.
There are two main D3 Conferences on the west coast - the Northwest Conference (NMW) and the Southern California Conference (SCIAC). There are also a couple of independent schools - most notably Chapman in Orange County.
My son ended up in the NWC. The conference is filled with smaller, generally academic liberal arts colleges.
The baseball is pretty darn good. Linfield, the conference champ, made it to the final day of the D3 world series this year and the runner up, Pacific Lutheran was a very fine team - one that I think would have gone a long way in the playoffs had they been included. Having watched multiple games this year and comparing them to the Northern California Juco teams I have seen over the last few years, I'd take the NWC teams in a 3 game series. Players are older and generally more fundamentally sound.
From an Engineering point of view, most of the NWC schools either do not have engineering or only offer engineering through a 3-2 program where you go to their school for 3 years and then finish the engineering degree at another school in 2 more years. One such NWC is the University of Puget Sound - their program is described here:
http://www.pugetsound.edu/acad...-degree-engineering/
Whitworth offers a similar 3-2 program. One school which dies have engineering is George Fox which has an engineering program with multiple majors.
Alternatively, at least two of the SCIAC schools offer Engineering - Cal Tech and Claremont. Cal Tech has historically been a terrible baseball program but Claremont is pretty good and has fine academics to go with the baseball.
As for the whole low D1 categorization, my opinion is that nearly all of the baseball being played in the west coast conferences is mid to high D1 and that most of the low level D1 teams are concentrated on the east coast and north. Seattle University is one exception as a new D1 team - but, on the other hand, they lost to D3 Pacific Lutheran in a match up last season. I also think that far too much is made of D1 vs D2 vs D3 - the levels overlap with the top teams in each division being capable of playing competitively at least one level higher if not two levels higher.
Hope this helps,
08