My experience with this was about 30 years ago in a different country and school context, so most won't apply, but I wanted to +1 SFrog's point above. When I left home for post secondary education I did not feel any different from my peers. And I mostly wasn't. So I tended to shrug off those concerns from adults and be annoyed at restrictions.
Looking back, my parents were a lot more worried than I was. And they guided my placement carefully. And I was grateful for that. But they didn't make me feel they would have behaved much differently if I had been 2 years older, and I was also grateful for that.
From my experience institutions are equipped to handle minors for emergencies (I landed in urgent care/ER once a year my first 3 years, at 16, 17 and 18) -- they have to be, for those (admittedly rarer and rarer) not-quite-18 normal aged students.
