<p>Another disadvantage is that the student is not exposed to engineering courses to decide if they really want to be an engineer! I think that is a huge problem.
Many engineering students earn a BS and MS in a 5 year program, so you need to judge whether that is better than getting 2 bachelor’s degrees.
Are there any relatively small engineering schools that you can visit with her? Their idea of big and small changes once they get out of high school but they can’t imagine that being the case. My son was originally really focused on small schools but as we visited colleges he started liking some of the medium-sized universities such as Case Western.
Clarkson is fairly small and a little less selective than schools like RPI, though it is remote.
Being female will help somewhat with acceptances, she will be perhaps given a little slack on grades or SAT scores relative to the averages at the school. But she has to be motivated to do the work. She might like WPI, it is about 5,000 but it has a small school feel to it, but she would have to raise her GPA a little. If she seems like a really strong candidate, she could earn merit awards - many engineering schools are trying hard to get more girls to enroll.
What about your state schools? They probably don’t meet the “small” requirement but…</p>
<p>Also, this subject has been discussed many times on CC, search for 3+2 or 3/2 and you will find them.</p>