Exactly-- the kinds of children who have a need for academics which are 3-5 years beyond their chronological age by adolescence are probably not going to get those needs met well in the long haul WITHOUT radical acceleration in the picture.

It is really about examining "least-worst" in an individual setting.

I think that the assumption that EG/PG kids will be "less competitive" if they've been accelerated may be false to begin with.

We might have worried about it when DD was five or six if we had been thinking about 'elite' college placement, which we were most emphatically NOT--

but it became obvious in the past 18 months that in spite of being 3y young-for-grade, she's STILL competitive at those places.

It's just not a guarantee. Then again, even superstars don't necessarily get any kind of guarantee either, so it's not clear that an additional year or two would have made one bit of difference anyway.

That's actually why I started this thread. I think that it IS entirely possible for a 15yo PG student to go to Harvard, UC Berkeley, MIT, or Caltech.

Our decision-making is revolving NOT around where she might be "good enough" to get in--

but around which kind of environment is better for her as a 15yo.

We're really not wishing that we'd redshirted her (so to speak) so that she'd be a ringer...

So she IS competitive at schools that have 8-20% admission rates. We know this. A few of those with 25-35% acceptance rates have even waived portions of their standard applications for her-- without even knowing her age or seeing her transcripts, but just on the basis of scoring so well on the PSAT (on which, to be clear, she had a not-so-awesome outing).

The question is, should she do that, or attend the local self-contained honors college (which also has something like a 15% acceptance rate) and probably earn one of the 60 "full ride" scholarships there? I'm thinking that that option looks pretty awesome, myself-- because it will allow her to continue being both her chronological and cognitive ages simultaneously.



Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.