School starts in mid August and ends in May. Two different years.
Graduated Class of 95
Were they in the Aug 95 - May 96 school year?
Or the Aug 94 - May 95 school year?
A new coworker insists the 1st option is correct. That doesn’t sound right. But I graduated so long ago that I don’t recall the calendar dates anymore.
What’s the straight dope?
It’s the actual year you graduate.
What are you getting at with the class of 88 in the title?
The “class of X” year is the year indicates the year they’ll graduate, not the beginning of the school year. So if they graduated in 1995, their last school year was from August or September of 1994 through May or June of 1995. But I’m not sure how this works with year-round school.
So, your coworker is, um, confused.
Normally in US parlance it refers to the class that graduated May 95.
At some schools you may be graduated as of the end of the semester or quarter when you completed the degree but attend the next May/June’s commencement for the ceremony.
Wow. Just wow. 
It’s just a 2nd example.
I had always thought Class of xx meant when the school year ended.
This new employee had us wondering if we were remembering incorrectly. He graduated a lot more recently than I did.
Thanks for the clarification.
First, everyone is correct It is the year they graduated - the end of the school year, which usually means May or June.
The one construction I have seen that is somewhat similar to your OP is when someone says they were “Class of 98, but graduated in 99”. Usually that means that they entered with everyone else in Fall of '93, but did something that changed their school length. For example, they took a year off, or they combined programs and got their Masters and undergrad degree at the same time, which took 5 years instead of 4. They choose to attend re-unions (or get class newsletters or whatever) with the group that they entered with, rather than the group they graduated with.
Sort of like me? I was class of 7T7 originally but graduated in 8T5 after a stint in the real world.
Wait, what does “class of 7T7” mean?
Maybe some weird phonetic transcription of “seventy-seven”? Never seen this before if that’s what it is.
University of Toronto does that for some odd reason
I’m guessing that University of Toronto does that as a combination of the phonetics and a play on their abbreviated nickname – U of T.
If you would have graduated, you would have anecdotal data
Oh, and to address the original question, it’s definitely the end of academic year, not the beginning, for the construction of Class of YYYY. The only time you might reference the beginning would in a phrase like “the entering class for 2016” (that just started college this year). But that class will still be referred to as the Class of 2020.
My son’s college had only one commencement ceremony per year, so people who completed their degree requirements at the end of the fall semester still “graduated” at the end of spring. That’s how their diplomas were dated, even though their transcripts showed differently.
Hmmm… looking it up it seems they have been doing that for their last 16 classes as well even though it does not work out phonetically (0T0, 1T2).
High schools use the same numbering logic. Every year around high graduation time there would be the usual spray-paint graffiti “Class of 08” or “Grad 16”. Yeah, UofT used the 7T7 or 9T5 or whatever, to be clever. 7T7 meant 4 year degree should be done in May, 1977. I guess they didn’t want to waste a good thing, so they carried on with 0T0 et cetera… Meaning if your name was Otto, you spent forever explaining that you did not spell your name wrong on your jacket.
Yeah, I was going to say it meant that the person was originally scheduled to graduate in 1988, but wound up not finishing until 1995. Even though I’d never heard that construction, that just seemed to be what would make sense.
Ironically, Clown College does it differently.
The meaning varies by college. Some places take the entry year and add 4 and that’s your graduating class. Doesn’t matter if you take 3 years or 5 or 10.
The place I went to had a lot of part-timers so that didn’t really work. People started in and graduated in all 4 quarters. If you graduate Fall 94 to Summer 95, you’re Class of 95. Fall and Winter grads get their own small ceremony plus they can also attend the big Spring one. Summer grads the same but their big Spring ceremony is with the following year despite their designation.
It’s all a completely useless designation of no value whatsoever.
(It was especially annoying to have college administrators, including my college president uncle, refer to the Class of 2000 as the first class of the new millennium. If they stopped the “Class of” nonsense, they could have avoided embarrassing themselves.)