Students By the Numbers:

As graduation approaches, it's interesting to engage in an education retrospective and answer the question, "What's been going on with students these days?" Check out these stats.

* 90 percent of high school seniors expect to attend college (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002)

* 75 percent of high school graduates go on to secondary education within two years of receiving their diplomas. (The Education Trust-West, 2002; The High School Diploma: Making It More Than an Empty Promise)

* A growing number of college students are over the age of 25

* Women outnumber men on college campuses, and more women obtain college degrees than men

* Demographic projections show that next year or the year after, the annual number of high school graduates in the United States will peak at about 2.9 million after a 15-year climb, say reports published in The New York Times

* The number of white high school graduates will go down nationally in the future, and the number of African-American graduates will remain relatively steady. But the number of Hispanic and Asian-American graduates will increase sharply, according to projections by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.