Mom here, with two already in college and a freshman female starting in August.
What pops out immediately at me is…
If she doesn’t need to work, then why are you supplying her with a car? Is she not living on campus? Are bicycles not adequate?
IMHO, giving her a car if she doesn’t really need it is babying her, and also in my humble and even more paranoid maternal opinion, is likely to make her even more of a target for horny college males, being not only “fresh meat”, but also possessed of that magical item, a car. Frank Zappa’s “would I lie to you just to get into your pants?” added to, “Would I lie to you just to use your car to take you to this rock concert? And then get into your pants…”
We discussed giving La Principessa a car to use this fall and nixed it on precisely those grounds. If she’s going to fall in love during her vulnerable freshman year, we want her to fall in love with someone who’s really interested in her, not in the fact that she’s (a) new, (b) naive, and (c) has a car.
…so her big brother Bonzo is going to have the car at his apartment, for his senior year, for his use, having paid some serious dues by riding a bike his first three years. And thus she will have the use of it, but any horny college boys who wanna hit on this particular lassie in order to use her [dad’s] car will have to go through a former wrestler who although a feminist, turns out to have some surprisingly male chauvinist attitudes regarding his kid sister. 
But other than that…yanno, you just gotta let 'em go. Let them make their own mistakes, stand by ready to bail them out from total disasters as needed, but otherwise, it’s like the first day of kindergarten, and you just gotta drop them off at school and then go home, and trust them to take your good upbringing and use it.
It’s not easy, I’m here to tell you that, but it’s just something that has to be done.
I would not worry too much about what you perceive as your daughter’s emotional immaturity and being a follower rather than a leader, and trying to extrapolate that to possible future events. I’d go by what behaviors you have observed so far: ask yourself, is she the sort of person that when everybody else is chugging Jello shots, she’ll just grin and join in out of fear of being “different” or the oddball? Or if everybody else is chugging Jello shots, but she isn’t really in the mood for Jello shots, would she be more likely to stand back and go, “no thanks”?
If the latter, then I wouldn’t worry. If the former, you can go ahead and worry, but there’s not going to be a damn thing you can do about it, so you might as well resign yourself to it. Like I said, you gotta let 'em go, and keep your fingers crossed.
Comfort yourself with statistics, like I do: for every college kid who accedes to a hazing request and kills himself by drinking a fifth of Vodka, or locks himself in the janitor’s closet and is electrocuted, there are thousands upon thousands who don’t. The vast–VAST–majority of college kids make their way safely, even tediously, through their four years, having formative experiences and acquiring some new life skills along the way, and emerge at the other ends as (mostly) adults.
In my experience, “joiners” tend to do better their freshman year than “loners”, because colleges, especially big universities, have lots of experience at the ways in which freshmen can go astray, like partying, etc. So they have tons of freshman activities lined up for that whole first semester; virtually every day there are things planned, and the weekends are packed with “stuff to do”. So if she’s a joiner, she’ll find lots of venues for her social tendencies. You can encourage her to go out for even the most esoteric and boring-sounding activities, things like glee clubs and whatnot. Even if she spends an hour being bored to death at a Young Republicans or Young Democrats coffee, this will help her make new, useful friends (present it to her as “networking”), and will keep her out of mischief, and give her stuff to think about other than that kewl party this weekend.
A big university will have enough on-campus stuff (including, sometimes, Pizza Hut) that she shouldn’t need to go off-campus at all her freshman year for anything except Wal-Mart or church, and if she does need to go to Wal-Mart, or church, she can either get a ride with somebody (more networking), or walk, or bike, or ride a bus if they have them. We didn’t see it as a great hardship for Bonzo to spend his first three years basically within the confines of the University of Illinois (two years in a dorm and his junior year in an apartment close to campus), mainly because Urbana has an excellent bus system. If he really needed to go to Wal-Mart, he could ride a bus, or catch rides with people, or shop when he came home for occasional visits. It’s all part of the problem-solving aspect of growing up; adults don’t expect to have things handed to them on a platter, they’re expected to figure out for themselves how they’re going to get new underwear, or go to church, or travel to that party.
Really, she doesn’t need to be in the typical American “wheels available at all times” mode.
If she’s going to be living in a dorm, I’d definitely think about getting her a meningitis vaccination, if the school doesn’t already require it.
Second that if she wants to go to vet school, yeah, she does not have the luxury of a bad semester. Bonzo started out as pre-vet, and immediately found that vet schools, being scarce, can afford to be picky, and after two bad semesters, he basically gave up on the whole idea of being a veterinarian. Which was too bad, but as he had also discovered the fairly high “ick” factor involved in being a vet (wait till she meets the Fistulated Cow), it wasn’t that huge a trauma.
