Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Ivy League Admissions.

Parents who worry about sending a young student to college should note that the high school environment may be worse.

18-19 is quite typical, according to DD, and this makes complete sense to me in light of her peer cohort's birthdays over the years-- she is a full 3 years (and in some cases 4) behind the "typical" students.

Late kindergarten entry becoming the norm is to blame, I suspect.

The practice of “redshirting” kindergarten students by delaying their school entrance for a year is not as widespread as previously reported, according to a recent study from the University of Virginia and Stanford University.

About 4 percent of children delay kindergarten, the study found, based on an analysis of national longitudinal data that tracked more than 10,000 infants from birth in 2001 through school entry.

Earlier studies and news reports have estimated national rates between 5 percent and 19 percent or even higher.

The redshirting rate is higher for boys (5 percent compared with 2.5 percent for girls), for white children (6 percent compared with less than 1 percent for black children), and for those from wealthy families (6.4 percent for the wealthiest quintile compared with 2.3 percent for the poorest quintile).

Where I am, the numbers for redshirting are much higher. My young-for-grade kids routinely have classmates up to two years older than they are.

Therefore when I rather unexpectedly was accepted into a good college, Yale, I was determined to make the most of it. I disdained the “preppies” and other privileged students who seemed to regard college as an opportunity to enjoy freedom at long last. I was an intensely serious student, what would probably be called today a “grind.”
At Yale I ended up pursuing two entirely different majors – physics and medieval history. There was no relationship between them in my mind except that both fascinated me. I liked dusty archives, learning to decipher manuscripts in medieval script, and learning all the languages necessary to read the primary and secondary historical literature, especially Latin. I wrote a senior thesis on the use of Latin by contemporary monastic writers to describe the vibrant world of 12th century Flanders in which they lived. I also enjoyed English legal history and the foundations of the Common Law as established in the 11th through 13th centuries. I also did a lot of work on the hagiography of Saint Denis, patron saint of the French monarchy during its formative period in the 9th century.
Physics was entirely different: clean and modern, logical and mathematical. I was lucky enough to be asked by a professor to assist him on an experiment in elementary particle physics at the then-new Fermilab outside of Chicago, home of the world’s largest particle accelerator. I would fly back and forth from New Haven to Chicago, feeling very serious and very important. We were involved in the search for the quark, a sub-atomic particle then only theorized. I eventually wrote my senior thesis, which was later published, on the “charmed quark.”
As far as course choice was concerned, I had no interest in between the extremes of medieval history (history, language, philosophy) on the one hand, and science (physics, chemistry, mathematics) on the other. It may sound shocking to Kennedy School students, but I have taken exactly zero social science courses in my entire life. My arrogant view at the time was that life would eventually teach me political science, sociology, psychology, and even economics, but it would never teach me linear algebra or Latin. It seemed best to get my tuition’s worth from the other topics and get my social science for free!
The end of college brought the usual crisis of what to do next. Such a bimodal distribution of training and interests made the problem more acute. The default solution was to go to medical school, since my father was a physician and I had worked in hospitals back in Philadelphia.
Fortunately, I was rescued from this dilemma by the awarding of a Rhodes scholarship, entitling me to free study at Oxford University.
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