Just echoing some of the points above:
Hopefully the Clemson camp provides some clarity about whether Bio is of interest. If they emerge with an interest in a specific branch or subfield of Bio, that is fine, but if not, that is also fine. Starting off just in general Bio is not a bad idea at all, they can and probably should take time to get a better understanding of the many different Bio subfields and related careers before committing to any given path.
And I would not let the presence of a lot of premeds in some of the initial Bio and Chem classes be a major deterrent. Soon enough a lot of those kids will choose other paths anyway, and then if Bio is the ultimate pick for your kid, and they are starting to choose their advanced classes in light of evolving interests, possibly choosing a specialty major, that may end up including few or none of the surviving premeds.
All that said, I agree if Engineering is a serious option, perhaps they should begin in Engineering, particularly since if they are looking to do it on a shortened schedule it may be pretty intense. My two cents is I would not try to do that just because of a career assessment, but if they are truly interested in the possibility, it will very likely be easier to start in Engineering then switch to Bio (or something completely unexpected at this point) than the other way around.
We don’t have enough details to really do a Match Me, so consider this just an illustrative example. But in my circles, a kid with these sorts of interests would likely be looking at Pitt, which is a really interesting university overall in a great location in a fun city, plus is very strong in these areas.
Pitt Engineering (Swanson) is one of the engineering colleges where all entering students are considered undecided, even if they have some idea of what they think they want. But unlike some such engineering colleges, there are not competitive admissions or restrictions on any of the engineering majors:
So if Bioengineering ends up the choice, great. But I agree Materials Science might also end up interesting to this student–so maybe that instead. Or so on.
But then lets say they realize engineering is not really their thing. It would then be easy enough to transfer to another college at Pitt, say Arts and Science (Dietrich) where Bio and other related majors are hosted:
See here about halfway down discussing Internal Transfers:
Note, though, there are some credit requirements basically making sure you do enough of your actual work at Dietrich. I don’t think this is atypical, just something to keep in mind that if they didn’t really want to explore Engineering AND wanted to graduate as quickly as possible, it would make more sense just to start at Dietrich.
But the other path is fine academically, it just might not be quite as quick in some circumstances.
Anyway, again all this is just illustrating how exploration can work at a given university. Pitt has the things I would be looking for–no big restrictions on specific Engineering majors, and no significant barriers to transfer to Arts and Sciences instead. But lots more colleges with robust Engineering options, and Bio options, and more besides, work like that, and thus would be academically suitable for an exploratory student.