| Columbia, unlike Yale and a few others, doesn't allow students to graduate without the ABET accredidation. Personally I liked this when applying but I guess I could see how it might be annoying to some...There are a few different avenues he could take tho.
Like Denz has said, AP/AM is a viable choice with fewer reqs than, say, EE or BME. Any of the IEOR majors are pretty much the same as far as reqs go and they tend to be seen as the glorified business major of the eng. school. I was also just looking at the website and found a major I didnt even know existed: Engineering Mechanics (under the CivilE dept). Any of these majors would allow for a fairly wide array of nontech classes to be taken.*
*Note: With the exceptions of AP and AM, none of these majors really need advanced placement to be able to take a bunch of extra classes. For example, Eng.Mechanics only needs 1 sem of chemistry anyways, doesn't matter if it's regular, intensive, or freshman orgo. Summer classes after freshman year will free up even more classes tho. I have a friend who took calc4 and a physics lab during the summer (at U.Mich AA i think) and Columbia is counting both.
Your other option is to get him to apply to a 3-2 or 4-1 program. This entails paying for a 5th year but you get to major in an eng. and a lib.art. Heck, if you pick one of the eng's above and do summer classes along with a 5 year program, you could probably double major and minor if not tripple major (if you carefully planned your classes and had enough overlap). |