<p>Anyone have any idea what the average Pre Med retention rate is for students going into college? It seems so many people want to do Pre Med and then they realize Chem is hard, or they can't do math. Then they are forced to find something else? I feel its got to be pretty low, compared to other majors, or, choices.</p>
<p>I don’t know numbers, but you are correct. its quite low. Then of those that make it as far as applying less than 50% get in.</p>
<p>It depends on the school. The only number I’ve heard was of a 15 years ago class at Brown, I guess around 50% of premeds who made up like 60% of the freshman class or something dropped it eventually.
Premed is a good core curriculum though… you can go easily off to engineering, math, physics, biochemical sciences, etc</p>
<p>There’s probably no statistics on this because most colleges don’t track pre-med students. How would you tell if a freshman in biology is pre-med or a prospective science major or simply getting gen eds out of the way? </p>
<p>I don’t believe that very many beginning college students are determined to go to medical students. At my college there’s a big group of “maybe pre-meds” who will take 1 or 2 science classes in their first year to keep the option of medical school open, while exploring other majors and career paths. Counting them as pre-med drop-outs is like counting me against the retention rates of our economics, computer science and philosophy departments because I took intro classes in those fields while I was deciding on a major.</p>
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<p>While this may be true for some people, I agree with b@r!um in that a bigger part of it is that so many students come into college saying “I’m a pre-med” but aren’t super committed to it. I think a lot of people drop the “pre-med” label because they get to college and realize that there’s more out there than just medicine and law.</p>