tl;dr Berkeley is still exclusive even after you're admitted Berkeley has its own way of filtering students once they're admitted. This is most obvious with th

tl;dr Berkeley is still exclusive even after you're admitted Berkeley has its own way of filtering students once they're admitted. This is most obvious with the computer science majors, of which there are two that involve almost the same coursework. EECS is super hard to get into to begin with. Whereas anyone in the school can intend L&S CS, but there's a rather high GPA cutoff (at like 30th %tile but don't quote me) for declaring, and you're effectively barred from most upper-div CS classes until you've declared, usually second year IIRC. If you miss the cutoff for L&S or one of the other exclusive majors, you end up in an alternative. CS usually becomes the other CS: cognitive science. Yes it's a real field, but at Berkeley that just means you couldn't make comp sci. Cog sci has very few classes within its own major; instead everything is cross-listed with other majors, and you have a very hard time getting a spot in the class. The other common duo is Haas vs economics. And many of the required lower divs are "weeders," huge classes with low average grades that students perceive mainly as obstacles to the upper divs. I'm not saying this is a bad strategy, though.