What plans and aspirations made by high school seniors and college frosh commonly change? Examples:
- Intended major: something like 80% of US college students change their intended majors between entry and graduation, although many of them stay in the same general category (e.g. humanities to a different humanities, science to a different science, etc.). In some majors, like engineering majors, attrition out of the major tends to correlate with weaker academic qualifications on entry.
- 3+2 engineering programs: it looks like very few frosh intending to do a 3+2 engineering program actually transfer to the "2" school to complete an engineering degree.
- Medical school: many frosh pre-meds eventually do not apply to medical school after seeing too low of a college GPA or MCAT score, and only about half of applicants to US MD medical schools are admitted to even one of them.
- Graduation in four years (eight semesters or twelve quarters): overall four year graduation rates are not very high, and, for individual colleges, they tend to be correlated to the colleges' admission selectivity. For an individual student, it seems obvious that a 3.0 HS GPA student who needs remedial course work in college is at higher risk of delayed graduation than a 4.0 HS GPA student whose AP scores fulfill base-level requirements.