[Jtsummers]

GT is a top-5 engineering school in the US across many different disciplines, it's not just any public state school. A lot of places recruit heavily from them that would be less interested in other state schools (including most other state schools in GA).

EDIT:

Some context for people unfamiliar with GA: GA Tech, historically, was the public engineering university for the state. For other public universities with engineering programs, most of them were distance versions of GT with students transferring to GT for the last couple years into the 00s (changed by the mid-00s with some students finishing at the host university but graduating with a degree from GT). UGA has only had a College of Engineering since 2012. But prior to that, since the 1930s, UGA had no major engineering program outside of agricultural and a couple other things, with the primary focus of engineering education in the state being at GT.

Other schools had other focuses, but not engineering until very recently.