[fragola]

>Stanley convinced a dean at Johns Hopkins to let Bates, then 13, enrol[sic] as an undergraduate.

>“I was shy and the social pressures of high school wouldn't have made it a good fit for me,” says Bates, now 60. “But at college, with the other science and math nerds, I fit right in, even though I was much younger. I could grow up on the social side at my own rate and also on the intellectual side, because the faster pace kept me interested in the content.”

OK, I might take a lot of heat for this, but I don't think it's a good idea to put a 13-year-old with college students. In this case, he was a boy, but imagine if he were a girl? One of the main causes of failure to achieve educationally for bright girls is getting pregnant. 40% of the fathers who impregnate girls under 15 are 20-29 years old [0]. So in the case of girls, this is a super visible obvious problem, but what happens with a teenage boy? I could see him getting in an abusive relationship or otherwise preyed upon in a zillion ways.

This article takes a blasé attitude toward the social concerns and cites no sources about the actual social outcomes for these kids. Let your kid study by themselves, send them to a gifted child summer camp, etc.

[0]http://www.teenmomnyc.com/

[jonathanedwards]

They called it "radical acceleration", but they don't do it anymore. There were some mixed outcomes, like mine. These days it would be considered unethical experimentation on human subjects.

[fragola]

Did you run into social adjustment issues?

[jonathanedwards]

Yeah big time. Not that it's ever easy for smart asocial people, but being four years younger than everyone else made it way worse for me. Some people managed a lot better though, especially if they could pass for older.

[dragonwriter]

> OK, I might take a lot of heat for this, but I don't think it's a good idea to put a 13-year-old with college students.

These kinds of things are rare enough that they tend to get a lot of attention, and I've yet to hear of a horror story of the kind that people tend to raise in the abstract, so I think that between parents, school administrators, and the particular students involved when this actually occurs in practice, things are generally handled fairly well.

That's not to say that there isn't legitimate reason to consider carefully, but I think the idea that this is somehow universally an unacceptable risk in every case is simply unsupportable from the factual experience. I'm interested in seeing any concrete evidence that would suggest otherwise, but generalization from what is typical of age groups to cases that are clearly atypical for their age group is, I think, insufficient to make that case.

[fragola]

>I've yet to hear of a horror story of the kind that people tend to raise in the abstract

First result on Google:

>When Sufiah Yusof was 13 in 1997, she was accepted by Oxford University but left the school in 2001. Although she later returned, she did not earn her degree. It was later found she worked as a prostitute in England before finding employment in the social work field[0]

People in this thread are acting like denying these kids entry to college is denying them the opportunity to learn. I just don't think college is the only way to learn (arguably, it's not even the best way). We have online courses, we have all kinds of resources.

[0]http://study.com/articles/How_Young_is_Too_Young_to_Enroll_i...

[aab0]

I don't think the students at Johns Hopkins are the usual sort of 20-29yos who would knock up a teen girl. And inasmuch as SMPY has been running for so many decades and has thousands of participants, if 10 or 20% of the participants were becoming teen moms, someone probably would've noticed by now.