It gives me no pleasure to crush dreams or to fail students, but do you want this guy, say, designing bridges?
Realistically it'll be at least 5 years from calculus class until he'll even be the most junior assistant to someone designing a actual bridge and from there probably at least 10 years until he'll be in charge of a bridge design. That's plenty of time of time to catch up. So why not just let him study calculus until he gets good enough to move on? Remove the three fails and you're out rule and the whole problem of students 'needing' to pass that particular course goes away.
If he really doesn't have the necessary talent then he'll never pass all the courses necessary to become an engineer and will never design bridges, but that should be up to him to discover, and if he wants to spend 12 years discovering that then that should very much be his prerogative.
Realistically it'll be at least 5 years from calculus class until he'll even be the most junior assistant to someone designing a actual bridge and from there probably at least 10 years until he'll be in charge of a bridge design. That's plenty of time of time to catch up. So why not just let him study calculus until he gets good enough to move on? Remove the three fails and you're out rule and the whole problem of students 'needing' to pass that particular course goes away.
If he really doesn't have the necessary talent then he'll never pass all the courses necessary to become an engineer and will never design bridges, but that should be up to him to discover, and if he wants to spend 12 years discovering that then that should very much be his prerogative.