Having said that, I recently met a 40 something woman who was academically accelerated and started college at 15. In her case, she wanted to be with her peers, but her parents insisted she move ahead and stay challenged. This girl said, she didn't have any friends because college students didn't want to hang out with her and younger kids were busy with their school lives. She ended up not finishing college and dropping out at 18. She did eventually go back and finished a degree at a much later date. She said she wished her parents hadn't done that to her. This was a very sobering story for me. It has been on my mind a lot. I think the key in this situation is that she didn't want to go to college. She wanted to be with friends, but her parents pushed. I think that has to be the difference - a kid pushing versus parents demanding.
This would be even further back than that, but my grandmother graduated high school at a similar age. She had an October bd, so she was a bit shy of 15 at the start of her senior year of high school, having skipped 3rd and 5th grades. At that time, there were few advanced education options for women so she went to secretarial school for a while to buy time until she was old enough to look for work and then later get married and have kids. She never expressed any dissatisfaction with the educational decisions that were made in her earlier years, though, and was a really wonderful woman who seemed satisfied with the way things had gone.
Like you mention, though, I really don't think that her parents were the ones pushing for the acceleration. They were Italian immigrants who likely just went along with whatever the schools were suggesting she needed.
My oldest will be graduating high school at 16, so not nearly as young as some of your kids, but she plans to attend college out of state straight out of high school. Hopefully we can figure out a way to finance that b/c we really don't have the $ saved and hopefully she won't be so young as to give schools pause about accepting her.
