Amen.
I live in Indiana and attended Ball State University’s College of Architecture and Planning, which offered Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. The Architecture school was ranked pretty high on the nation’s top 15 architecture schools while I was there. In fact, I think it may have been the top public school on the list.
Anyway, it definitely was NOT an engineering school, and in fact, Ball State doesn’t even have a real engineering program (I think they have something like “Mechanical Engineering Technology”, but it’s in a different college than CAP).
I graduated from the Architecture program, which is a fully accredited (via NAAB) five-year professional degree (meaning you can get registered after completing the degree, working for a couple of years, and taking the exam), but it was NOT a BS. In fact, it wasn’t a BA either – it was a “Bachelor of Architecture,” (B.Arch.). I think some schools offer B.A.Arch. or B.S.Arch. degrees, but they are four-year pre-professional degrees, meaning you have to go on to get a masters (M.Arch) in order to be registered.
That was when I was there (graduated in '03). A lot of schools are now moving toward a six-year program you earn an M.Arch. as the first professional degree (you basically do a 4+2, getting one of the non professional-degrees as a Bachelors, and then the M.Arch is your first professional degree, meaning you cannnot get registered with just the Bacheolors – you must complete the whole 6 years).
That said, you can be “an architect” without being registered. If you work in a large firm, you might not even care if you are registered…you can still do everything but legally stamp drawings, and if there’s someone in the firm that can, it doesn’t matter. If you want to move up high in the firm or start your own firm, you’ll want to get registered. A lot of architects take the exam in multiple states so they can work on projects based outside of their own state.