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Comment by adamc | Hacker News Reader

My parents both started college in 1939 at the age of 16. Being promoted to grades beyond your age cohort was apparently not so uncommon then.

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Yup, you read all sorts of stuff about kids graduating college at 18, etc. I'd imagine the further back you go, the higher the variance between best/worst education level in a given age cohort.. so school officials would just promote kids up a few grades if they were too smart.

I think there was also more variety in the structure of the school system. Eg maybe most people leave school at 14 and university starts at 16/17.

When I entered college (this century) they had all the freshman in my orientation group sitting in a lecture hall and the lady doing the "how not to die partying and related stuff" lecture asked if anyone in the ~100 person lecture hall was under 16. One person raised their hand.

I assume that was the "don't sleep with this person" warning. Way to feel welcomed to college.

Yup. The lady doing the lecture asked this person what month they were born before making it explicit.

Mean for sure but between the 15yo in question being a woman in a college environment and this only happening in front of 1/10th of 1/4th of the undergraduate student body I doubt it was of any practical hindrance.

Had a friend in grad school who was 15 when he entered... had his doctorate by 21.

How many years did he spend in college? Seems like he rushed for no reason and then slowed down.

Utility of being fast drops off in grad school. You can be a course master - but then you have to work. Working also means convincing others who are often going to look at a 15 year old skeptically.

Rushing through the middle-to-high-school curriculum is easy. Very, very little novel information actually gets taught over the ~200 hours that make up a school course.

Rushing through undergrad is possible if you do nothing but grind homework and study and read.

Grad school requires you to spend hours and hours in a lab, ass-in-seat, doing research. You're no longer competing with beer pong champions. Unless you're an absolute genius at finding the right direction to solving a novel problem, you're not going to get dramatically better results than your peers. And even if you are, you might be unlucky, and end up wasting a lot of time going down the wrong rabbit-hole.

Grad and post doc students are also often at the mercy of Professors and other academics who significantly slow you down even if you are an absolute genius. My professor guided me away from my core interests multiple times towards their interests by not providing the right mentorship even though they could. Then finally I found my calling and finished my thesis, I had to spend months rewriting it again and again even if my findings and the science behind it didn't change. Having to write unnecessarily dense paragraphs was apparently required. (I am not a genius by any means, just sharing what happens in academia)

You're describing grad school in the sciences for doctoral candidates. For other types of graduate education such as master's degree programs in public policy, international relations, or business administration it's totally possible to rush through if you can handle the load and can make the required course schedules line up.

I think he started college at 12 or maybe 13.

It was in physics. Maybe that played a part.

They also had the authority to do so with little to no oversight.

I went to high school with a girl who graduated at age 15 or 16. She was only a few months older than me, but was in senior year when I was a freshman. She also graduated college by 19 IIRC. I graduated high school in 2009 so this is not just some pre-WWII phenomenon.

I was 16 when I graduated high school not even 10 years ago. And IIRC I had a classmate who was 15.

EDIT: Almost forgot: I did skip a year during elementary, not sure about her case.

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