I would say most of the STEM majors at my university (top 20 US school) pushed students to the absolute brink in the first year, jam packed with advanced math, physics, and chemistry. It was pretty normal to come out of freshman year engineering, CS, or chemistry with a sub-2.75 GPA and the joy of learning completely stomped out of you.
I don't know if it was intentional or just the collective effect of having a bunch of professors with no teaching skills and god complexes who hated engaging with undergrads, happy to assign 40 hours of work per week per class with no regard to the fact that students are in 3 other equally-difficult classes.
Mostly (that I know of) people didn't switch out though, they just took the terrible treatment as it was supposedly normal to have a terrible GPA and terrible time in the STEM majors there. Also there were a lot of international students in the programs - I doubt going to America to study engineering and coming back with a liberal arts degree was an option for them.
Personally, I switched into Industrial Engineering which had notably fewer hard sciences requirements. Still miserable, but less so.
I also managed to find a loophole where each engineering major had its own stats class that was 95% the same content, then vaguely applying it to a problem in that field of study in a final project. So I satisfied my Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, etc. requirements by just taking MechE Stats and ChemE Stats.
They closed that loophole by the time I graduated by having one unified Stats course for all engineering majors.
I don't know if it was intentional or just the collective effect of having a bunch of professors with no teaching skills and god complexes who hated engaging with undergrads, happy to assign 40 hours of work per week per class with no regard to the fact that students are in 3 other equally-difficult classes.
Mostly (that I know of) people didn't switch out though, they just took the terrible treatment as it was supposedly normal to have a terrible GPA and terrible time in the STEM majors there. Also there were a lot of international students in the programs - I doubt going to America to study engineering and coming back with a liberal arts degree was an option for them.
Personally, I switched into Industrial Engineering which had notably fewer hard sciences requirements. Still miserable, but less so.
I also managed to find a loophole where each engineering major had its own stats class that was 95% the same content, then vaguely applying it to a problem in that field of study in a final project. So I satisfied my Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, etc. requirements by just taking MechE Stats and ChemE Stats.
They closed that loophole by the time I graduated by having one unified Stats course for all engineering majors.