<p>My son was interested in Math and Physics but also wanted a liberal arts setting. It got very tiring listening to all the recommendations for the “_IT” schools. He ended up at Swarthmore and was very happy (he double majored and is in a Physics PhD program now). Some of the other schools on his list that offer engineering were U of Rochester and Lafayette.</p>
<p>If you are academically qualified, Columbia SEAS students are required to take the same rigorous “Core Curriculum” as Columbia College students. That might not suit you, if you are looking for a broader range of electives. One quirky option is the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. They have no official Engineering major, although UCSB has an Engineering school; they have Math, Physics, Chemistry/Biochemistry and Computer Science, along with Art, Literature, and Music. It is a laboratory for creative, collaborative work within a public university.</p>
<p>One thing to keep in mind, engineering is a competitive field (like most others), and taking more than the average number of humanities courses, may cause you to miss out on engineering electives. This will make you less prepared as an engineer and will hurt you in your initial job search. At some point taking “American Fiction, 1900 to WWII” and not “Hydronics and Pneumatics for Building Systems” will have an impact. You have to find a balance. </p>
<p>As an engineer, you need to be very careful with something like UCSB’s Creative Studies program as you don’t want to lose focus on your engineering classes. </p>
<p>My suggestion is to do one of the 4+1 programs such as is available at Haverford or Bryn Mawr: you must major in Physics, CS, or Chemistry, but you CAN double major or minor in anything else. If you have a 3.0 in your STEM major, you move on to a 1-year Master’s in Engineering from Penn. 
And so you get to do everything you wanted without accrobatics and you have a Master’s from an Ivy League school.</p>
In case anyone stumbles across this post in the future and is wondering where I chose to go, I’m going to Tufts this fall. I found their engineering program to be the most interdisciplinary and collaborative of the schools that I got into, and Tufts is basically a liberal arts school with research university resources. Good luck to anyone else looking for the same thing in a school as I did.