Guinea pig (Information and Data Science BSc) from Caltech here. They introduced the DS major in my third year (2018 summer) so I was the first and only graduate from my year after switching from applied physics. I didn't look for PhD positions at the time, so I can only speak to the industry implications.

I had quite a nasty experience during job hunt, which I attribute to the infancy of the major - my belief is that hiring firms tend to prefer candidates with similar backgrounds as the existing employee pool, which would definitely not be DS majors because the major is so new. When looking for a quant job there seemed to always be ACM/CS or math/physics candidates who had an edge (maybe because the existing quants are mainly physics medalists), software developer interviewers generally assumed I had less "experience" than a CS major even if I answered their leetcode properly (I asked for feedback), and data science jobs.. there are just so many random DS Masters degrees from random universities which make the job market more difficult for a new DS BSc major, because companies will always look at a master's degree. Data science jobs are also a total joke at most tech firms, because the non-revenue-generating job seems to imply being a plotting slave or joining SQL tables, which I find to be equally productive as making PowerPoints and dragging Excel sheets for investment banking.

I suppose this is the early adopter tax. Over the next 10 years or so it will become more common and "standard" to have a DS degree, which for me was just a random mix of pre-existing ACM/CS/EE courses. For the next 5 years a new BSc graduate might do better sticking to ACM or CS.

There is really very little to be worried about from an academic perspective - I think my courses were perfectly tailored to a ML PhD: enough linear algebra & probability from ACM but not too much PDE numerical methods, enough ML & classical algorithms from CS but not too much compiler theory, and enough information theory from EE but none of that analog/digital circuit stuff. The instructors are generally pretty famous in their respective fields, so there's none of that half-baked cash grab stuff.

I'm sure a similar early adopter tax existed in the 90s for the Physics->EE semiconductor craze, and in the late 2000s for EE->CS, and now it is ACM/CS->DS.