This is similar to the engineering program I discussed above. Anyone could sign up for pre-engineering classes and then they would take the top 110 applicants based on the GPA for the classes I listed. EE was a popular major and had a higher GPA requirement than mechanical engineering and chem and industrial had fewer applicants so the GPA requirements were lower. I had several friends in my freshman year who went into one of these fields.
This matches my experiences in engineering school in the early-mid 1980s. Those of us hoping to get into EE had fallback majors in mind.
Electromagnetics (EM) classes were difficult for a lot of EE students, and resulted in some dropping out or switching. But none of the teachers seemed to be trying to flunk people, as much as maintaining strict standards.
Possibly too strict: one professor told the class on the first day that if you didn’t use EM in your job, you weren’t really an EE, but a technician. That may have been more true then than now, but even then there were EE specialties which didn’t involve much if any EM work (microelectronics fabrication, digital signal processing, etc.)
Hmm, maybe those EM classes were weeders after all?
Not any more at least. Back when colleges were prouder of their heritage and reputation than they were of their endowment it was actually possible to be booted for not being able to meet the standards of higher education. Now anyone can be an Ivy League stamped physician if they’ve got enough money.
None of the second year classes were weedouts. There was just the normal circuits classes and such. As I said, upthread, the number of students were whittled down to 100 from 110, but it wasn’t that bad. Once you became a junior then there weren’t any problems. Classes could be repeated — once.
The point isn’t that they aren’t easy classes requiring mainly attendance and hard classes where getting a B is highly laudable. The point is failing one class is not that big a deal, particularly when you are in good company.
I got an A- (80-85%) in the hardest weeder course, along with 4 other students. One person got an A, which was the highest mark (85-100%). There were 350 bright students in the class. The exam questions were basically impossible to solve in the allotted time - you basically got full marks by correctly reducing it to seven equations with seven unknowns. The posted answers were often twenty pages long.
That said, at some Scottish universities, an A is a mark over 60%, and things are marked brutally hard. But again, you need lots of second failures to actually flunk. Many switch, others buckle down.
Yeah, my immediate thought was Organic Chemistry. I wasn’t pre-med but I always knew that that was the class intended to weed out the folks who would not be able to make it as doctors. I barely got an A- in my high school chemistry class and I still don’t know how that happened; I was absolutely miserable in it and literally every single concept that was discussed flew past my head quicker than a speeding 747. I ended up taking anthropology and cosmology courses to satisfy the gen-ed science requirements in college.
As a liberal arts/social science degree holder, I wouldn’t say that there were deliberate ‘flunk out’ courses at my school, but there were mandatory sequenced classes that some people had to take more than once because of poor performance on the first attempt. Apparently my school’s upper division writing course - which every student across all majors had to pass - was such a huge roadblock for a lot of folks that many of them would put it off until their final terms.
This sort of thing has been around a looooong time: From Wikipedia:
I attended “the Ohio State University” in the late 70’s (graduated from another school) and at college orientation they made it clear that every year only 50% of engineering students stayed in engineering after the first year. Physics and Calculus were the weeding out processes. It’s not the subjects were hard to learn, but the speed at which they did the lessons were too much for party type people to keep up with. I eventually transferred to a local private college while continuing to live at “the Ohio State University” campus and passed those courses easily because the class room were smaller and the professors weren’t forced to beat on the students.
Turns out that State supported college made more money by accepting just about everybody who applied and let them flunk out and then keeping “the best” for the engineering programs. The private school made money by keeping people in the program and getting them to come back. Many of my friends were engineering students graduating from “the Ohio State University” and they were shocked at how well I was doing in engineering without having been beat with a stick.
The average graduation rates in the US is around 58%.
There are just under 17 million undergraduate students enrolled in colleges in US.
It is estimated that of that 17 million undergraduates enrolled that 48% (8 million) are in their first year.
So of the 8 million that are admitted and enrolled in college, approximately 42% (3.4 million) of them will drop out before they graduate.
There are many reasons why students drop out, but not being able to cut the academic rigor of classes would not be surprising to be a high reason.
In my major, the cull classes came in my 3rd year. Roughly 2/3 of students majoring in my degree changed majors or dropped out before the end of the 3rd year.
I went to a largish (~25K enrollment), prestigious (at least, I think of it as prestigious) public university. I had an epiphany late in my freshman year:
The university as an institution did not give a damn whether I flunked out, barely passed, or exceled. Their job was to make the education available, provide support during that education, and provide degrees to those that were able to complete the education provided. If someone flunked out, there were plenty of replacements available (I just looked up the current acceptance rate - 16.9%). It was quite a wake-up call (academic probation will do that to you).
I realized that they constructed their classes and curriculum so that those that did graduate were “top prospects” for careers, which meant that there would be filtering of those who started into those who finished. They didn’t create classes to “thin the herd”, they just didn’t care if such thinning occurred.
Once I realized this, it actually made it easier for me to buckle down and become one of those that made it through the filters.
I wonder how many of those students drop out but re-enroll later and finish college somewhere else?
I would think quite a few and it’s not always partying. Sometimes it’s homesickness. And I don’t know if the digital era makes homesickness worse or not. Being able to FaceTime with your high school friends for hours at no charge might make things worse. No more $200 long distance bills to shock a naive student.
It could also just be culture shock going from small town to large city or vice versa.
And, you can get so involved in campus activities that it consumes so much of your time that it eats into your study time. I was active in politics but I know it’s very easy to get wrapped up in supporting your candidate and not as much writing a paper about medieval history.
So, yeah, I’d say it’s probably common for a lot of freshman to drop out and have to regroup and try again.
My universities didn’t care about people who flunked first year (although the prestigious university cared *even less * than the technical university). Failing first year students can be replaced by other first year students of greater value.
But they did care about failing students in two ways:
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A problem final year student will be back next year. If possible, it’s easier to just push them through for a pass.
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Final year students are more fun than first year students. If possible, you would like to bias your student body more towards final-year students, honours, masters, and PhDs. If you can select students who get through to final year, you get to spend more time on the fun stuff.
Yes, it is hard to fail in your final year at just about all schools. At that point they are building you up to be representatives of the university. People that do flunk out or drop out in senior years don’t fend so well. People look at them as quitters who couldn’t finish what they started, like some one with a dishonorable discharge from the military.
It was rumored on my undergraduate campus that the biology and chemistry classes were difficult to encourage weaker students to switch from a pre-med track to something else - assuring that only the brightest students applied for medical school and thus raising the med school acceptance rate.
This is how it was for me at Univ of Washington. Calculus and Chemistry were large arena classes with non-interactive lectures and little to no TA or tutor support. Assignments were laborious and, IMO, often deliberately obfuscated to steepen the weed-out grading curve. Moving into the 200-300 level math and science classes afterwards, with small class sizes and actual teaching feedback ind interaction, were a relaxing experience by comparison.
Honestly, I don’t see this as the primary reason. Classes will be graded on a curve and the more students there are the more difficult the class needs to be.
Are those matriculated students? Because I’ve earned credits at six different institutions but only earned a degree at one of them.
When I looked up the acceptance rate for my alma mater, I also looked at “graduation rate”, I saw that they kept stats on 1 year retention (freshman or transfers) and graduation rate by “entering cohort” (freshman or transfers).
I’m going to ignore transfers and just give my eyeballed averages for freshman cohorts (2004-2014):
1 year retention ~96% +/- ~2%
Graduation Rate (4 years) ~73% +/- ~3% (but not random fluctuations- ~69% in 2004, then a flat 71% until 2010 when it shot up to 75%)
Graduation Rate (5 Years) ~88% +/- 1%
Graduation Rate (6 years) ~91% +/- ~0.5%
So, with the caveat, “lies, damned lies, statistics”, it looks like the 58% average may have a very large sigma (at least for largish, elite universities with low(ish) acceptance rates). 
When I was an Aerospace Engineering student in the late '80s, I was told by upperclassmen that Fluid Mechanics II was our “weed-out” course. Make it through that one, they said, and senior year would be a breeze. Well, I made it through (not pretty, but I did it), and really looked forward to an easier-than-junior-year senior year.
And then came Fluid Dynamics. I made it through the first homework assignment before grabbing a drop form and changing my major to Mechanical Engineering. My roommate was made of heartier stuff than I; he lasted all the way through the first quiz before following my lead.
I can’t tell if we were anomalous cases or if the upperclassmen were all wrong, but there was certainly a weed-out course in my case. 