Posted by Howard Richman on March 31 2008 at 10:33:46:
An article in The Guardian, a British newspaper, discusses the growing trend, which is still tiny in Britain, of letting students into the university before age 18. (Even going to college at 17 is considered extraordinary in Britain.) Here is a selection:
The number of under-18s studying at English universities has gone up by over 50% in the past six years, according to figures that suggest that ambitious teenagers are taking advantage of new anti-discrimination laws to demand an early place. There are nearly 8,000 under-18s at university - up from less than 5,000 in 2002, figures obtained from the Higher Education Statistics Agency by the Guardian show. The overwhelming majority started only a year early, at 17, but official documents suggest there are up to 100 university students under 16....HowardSufiah Yusof fled Oxford University in 2000, aged 15, after her third-year exams. She was found after a police search, and blamed her parents for too much pressure; she never finished her course and became an administrative assistant for a construction firm. Her younger siblings, Aisha and Iskander, attended Warwick University together at the ages of 17 and 12, graduating in 2002.
Peter Dunn, head of communications at Warwick, said: "We´ve been there we´ve done that, we´re loath to do it again because we want to make sure students have all the opportunities uni can offer. They were challenging circumstances we´d not want to repeat. They did fine, they came out with fine degrees but we´re not sure we´d rush to do it again. At the end of the day university is about the life experience as well as education alone.
"Rather than pushing children into uni too early, the University of Warwick now supports talented children in schools until they are old enough for university." The university cannot bar under-18s because of anti-age discrimination laws....
Ruth Lawrence graduated from Oxford University aged 13 in 1985, with first-class honours in maths. She was home schooled, and her father rarely left her side at Oxford. She became a professor at 19, but fell out with her dad. Now teaches in Israel and has vowed never to hothouse her own children.
Wang Yinan was 12 when he arrived in the UK from China and within two years was fluent in English. He won a place at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to study material science two years later in 2005. He had already scored 98% in an Open University maths degree which he took "for fun"....