There just isn’t a lot of room in the schedule of an engineering student for electives. I think my daughter gets 2-3 outside of engineering for her entire 4 years. She has a few ‘electives’ within her major, but it not as if she can take a religion course instead of concrete or math. My nephew is in Engineering at a flagship. He is required/allowed to take 15 credits (so 3-5 classes) of courses in the arts and sciences college, as required by ABET (history, languages, econ); at my daughter’s school, which is a tech school, there just aren’t that many options so she’s told to take econ or ancient civ to satisfy those requirements.
I happened to attend the same flagship my nephew attends. One of my friends was in engineering, and she just decided right up front that she was going to take 5 years to graduate because she wanted to take more electives. I remember she took piano, mythology, and a few other classes she was interested in. Of course, that was back in the days when it added about $3000 to her total cost to stay for an extra year, and she could make pretty good money in the summers.