I am sorry but if he is Asian than he will have a harder time getting into any university that is better than his state schools. The problem with being Asian is that you have to compete among other Asians for the top spot at the top universities, and a lot of the time that’s only 20 percent of the seats available. The colleges like to try to diversify their student body but because Asian Americans in general place a giant emphasis on education, that usually results in higher competiton. The thing is that apparently diversity improves the educational quality of the students. Another thing that you may want to consider is going to a college that has a large teacher to student ratio. If you go to a school like this, then you can get away with skipping class and not paying attention in class and the professor won’t get onto you constantly or notice that you aren’t paying attention in class because he or she will be way too occupied with all the other students. Also, I noticed that you referred to your friend with the pronoun “him”, so I am assuming that he is a male student. If this is the case, one thing that I would suggest is that if you go into any engineering major, no matter what the college is, it will be difficult to find a female partner that shares interests and values with you that you also enjoy being with, because, I would assume for cultural reasons, females don’t naturally tend to choose STEM majors too often. Why this is the case, I would assume because of historical prejudices, but that’s a topic for another day. Also, being in a relationship in your freshman year of college might be challenging because of the high amounts of stress that attending a new college could cause. But in the end, it is your choice. Oh yea, one more friend is that his chances of admission into a college of his choice can also be contingent on his country of origin. Because colleges aim to diversify their student body as a whole as much as possible, they try to obtain people from as many different cultural upbringings as possible. Some ethnicities within Asians are generally overrepresented in college and higher education, while others are generally underrepresented there. As a general rule of thumb, your ethnicity is more likely to help you in college admissions if you are Hmong, Indonesian, Bengali, Pakistani, or Middle Eastern than if you are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Indian. I noticed that you didn’t specify which ethnicity he was and that could make quite a bit of a difference in his admission chances and whether or not he gets in to the college that he desires.