Agreed. IE appears to be a far better fit for this student than typical undergraduate business offerings.
Really, it looks like his choices here are based on major and price, not school and price. Did he apply to any other less expensive schools which have IE majors?
If he does go to Alabama, he may want to supplement his course work with upper division math courses in optimization, stochastic processes, etc… But he may still find the business school course work to be uninteresting due to the low math content.