No, the lady interviewed clearly said that she held her kids back because "you give your kids every advantage you can". Not that I think holding kids back gives them a long term advantage (a la Gladwell's 10,000 hours).
The advantage is to have them academically compete for valedictorian with people who are younger than they are, assuming that valedictorian = more college $$$.
I don't know. Maybe I am thinking that graduating high school at 16 as my oldest will, with a lot of AP classes and in the top chunk of the class, if not as the valedictorian, might look as impressive to scholarship committees and colleges as graduating as the valedictorian at 19.
This is our first go at high school, though, (she's our oldest), so I could be wrong. Even if I am, I suspect that we would have put her into college grossly unprepared to work had we held her out a year and not agreed to skip her b/c she'd be sleeping through 7th grade this year with straight As for bothering to step foot in the door. That would leave her with terrible work habits when she got to the point of needing them even if she was #1 in her high school graduating class.
For that matter, she could have chosen to attend our assigned high school or pretty much any other high school in our area other than the one she choiced to and been more likely to wind up valedictorian even with graduating at 16. She's in the highest performing high school in the area save for one charter. Point being, we didn't stack the odds in her favor if all we were looking at was making her appear to be #1. We have, however, hopefully placed her such that she is learning something.
Are parents really saying that they'd rather their kids look great and learn little than learn more and have to work harder at it? I don't believe in putting kids in over their heads, but this seems to be a bit too far in the opposite direction.
