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Notes -
I started college multiple years multiple as a consequence of living in a rural area where the local school didn't really have any resources for kids like me and parents that just wanted to try to find a way to help me learn as much as I could. The result is that I went to a university and then a graduate program that were probably beneath the tiers that I could have landed based on my apparent academic ability relative to peers, but that I got to start on my career much earlier than most people would. I was young enough at each step that there wasn't just some "youngest in cohort" style of effect, but so young that I stood out and everyone knew it. I've often wondered what life would have turned out like if I had the same basic abilities, but had instead lived in an affluent urban district where I would have just been another bright kid striving to get into good schools, and I really just have no way of conceptualizing what that life would have been.
In the Gladwellian context above, this would presumably make me severely underprivileged - always the youngest in my cohort by a mile, coming from a background that tends to not be academically successful in the first place. Really though, that just makes me think of how individualized these things actually are and how little these types of "privilege" have to do with how we actually experience life. At no point did I ever feel like I was held back by the unfairness of being years younger than my classmates and colleagues. I've always felt incredibly lucky to have the natural advantages I have in life - complaining about it would just seem remarkably tone deaf to me.
I'm on the far "disadvantaged" end here and my response would literally be a snort of derision that I should get bonus points for being young. The scores are what they are, you earn them as fairly as you can at any point in life. We have different backgrounds, different strengths and weaknesses, and the impulse to level all that off seems utterly perverse to me. Personally, I'm perfectly happy to extend that across all forms of supposed privilege, but I suspect that the students wouldn't find that all that compelling.
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