<p>Well ucbalumnus, I suppose Berkely allows students to have official engineering major status right away because they are a top-tier school and they tend to only admit students who have already proven their worth with AP credit, SATs, etc. At my school, a student with good credentials can be directly admitted <em>into the college of engineering</em> (which by itself comes with perks like ability to take the classes you need and participate in research or the eng honors program), but only as a “pre-engineering” major who must later declare.</p>
<p>As for every major being impacted, a guy from SoCal told me he landed at my school partly because of the enormous cost and difficulty of going to a school in the UC system and the ability to change majors once there (like a lot of engineering physics majors, he initially had his sights on something else).</p>