I personally think the problem is when students are denied entry to their major entirely and no matter what the GPA, the transition to impacted majors is not guaranteed. I’m specifically thinking of Purdue for CS. The admissions folks point blank told students last cycle that if they didn’t get accepted to CS, and knew that’s what they wanted to study, that they would be better off going to another school where they were accepted to CS.
I don’t have a problem at all with the transition to major from first year engineering programs to majors. IMO, (and I’ve said it before), if a student struggles to get a 3.0 in intro courses, it’s only going to go downhill from there.