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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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not a single student was born in 2001 or later (despite the fact that the potential birthdates for this cohort extended up to September 2001)

Okay, I'm very puzzled here. If "senior" means in American terms, in the last year of a four-year degree course, and if generally third level students are 18 when they enter college, then the seniors should be a minimum of 22 years of age.

If he ran the experiment this year, 2022, then 2022-22 = born in 2000. So where is the shock about "nobody was born in September 2001"?

What this really seems to be about is "nobody was super-smart enough to have skipped a year and so be under 22 in their final year", never mind all the discussion we hear about "really bright kids could be finished their degree by 16".

This seems to be saying I should be surprised that in a four year degree course, where students enter at age 18, they will be age 22 this year, so they can't be born later than 2000. I'm not seeing why I should be surprised? But then again, I was too stupid to go to university.

If they're eighteen when they enter (their first year of) college, then when they enter their fourth year of college, they should be twenty-one, as three years elapse from the first year to the fourth, not four.

I have a Spring birthday, so without skipping a grade or doing anything unusual I was 21 throughout most of my senior college year.

Most school districts have a cutoff for kindergarten the first day of school. So if someone just turned five September 1st, they could go to kindergarten the next week (if their school starts in September.)

I'm feeling pretty awesome right now because I did really well in school despite my apparent "disadvantage."

It's about kids being the oldest in their age cohort, and so more developed relative to their peers all throughout school. You're more likely to do well in school, sports, all sorts of things if you were born in the earliest part of your school cohort, and are thus six to eleven months older than half your competition.

The years are important because the birth cohort for seniors would have run from Sept. 2000 to Sept 2001. So mathematically, only a third should have been born in 2000, but 100% were. Somehow all the seniors in this class were from the first three or four months of their school-year birth cohort.

I turned 21 in spring of my senior year of college because I skipped a grade. That wasn’t terribly uncommon in my experience, I met others in a similar situation. Personally it surprised me to read that zero students in the class were a year ahead.