It's not about whether the work is harder or not. That will vary with each student's abilities. Many who could graduate engineering with honours would flunk out

It's not about whether the work is harder or not. That will vary with each student's abilities. Many who could graduate engineering with honours would flunk out of an arts program, and vice versa. A small subset of well-rounded high achievers have the raw intelligence to succeed in nearly all fields. What differs drastically, and objectively, (and FYI, I'm an engineering grad) is the QUANTITY of work. I had a very enlightening conversation with the professor who taught my 2nd year differential equations course (who was a math, not engineering, professor, and also the chair of undergraduate studies for that department, meaning that he was responsible for pretty well all undergraduate curriculum matters) where he told me that the entire BSc in mathematics program was designed to contain no more than 15 lecture hours per week, and to require a capable student to spend approximately 20-30 hours per week in addition to that in home study to master the material. A course would be considered well taught and well balanced if capable students were getting As while putting in this level of work. He went on to say that the Faculty of Applied Science had forced him to add 3 hours per week (one additional 1hr lecture and 2hr lab/tutorial) to his ODEs course for engineering science majors even though the content was identical to course offered for math majors. This is because the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board uses one and only one metric to determine a student's level of learning in a particular top - number of instructional hours. That is, if you teach people to solve y = y' for 6 hours a week for one semester (13 weeks), that is entirely equivalent to having taken ODEs for math majors (2 hrs / week), PDEs for math majors (2 hrs / week), and advanced PDEs for math majors (also 2 hrs / week). I was of course appalled by this and went on to discuss the topic with the Undergraduate Chairs of as many departments as I could - physics, chemistry, economics, philosophy, biology, and of course, my home department, engineering science. Without fail, the chairs of the non-engineering departments described a similar ideal schedule to what the math prof had said - and all of them emphasized that they felt students should have at least one day a week to devote to entirely extracurricular interests, while still having enough time to attend all scheduled lectures and tutorials, mastering the material and generally achieving 80% or better in all courses. In other words, you shouldn't need to be a slacker in order to have fun. What did the chair of my department tell me? "We expect students to spend 30-40 hours per week in class, in order to meet accreditation board requirements for instructional hours, and further, to spend about 30-40 additional hours per week to complete their assignments and master the material. Also, when I was an undergraduate I had it just as bad so STFU and get on with it." In sum, engineering educators have a fundamentally different view on what a full-time student's life should be like. And it is a view that necessarily compels a lower quality of life for the student.