Berkeley is a 15 or 20 minute BART (subway) ride away from San Francisco underneath the bay. However, BART doesn’t serve the whole city and public transit from Berkeley to some parts of the city involves bus or MUNI (another subway system) transfers. Could take an hour or more, depending on where you’re coming from. However, his family may well live outside of the city, possibly even in Berkeley, and the mother commutes into the city. In the Bay Area, like many major metropolitan areas, many fewer people work in the city proper than live there. I think it’s likely that his family does not live in SF proper. However, the Bay Area is large and sprawled out, so it’s hard to say whether the parents live very close to Berkeley or not just from knowing where his mother works.
Right, but the point is that either way, the kid lives with his family and not in the dorms.
Me too, but in my case, it was “boobs.”
I would be fine with my hypothetical super smart 12 year old taking college courses, but I’d hesitate to have him or her enrolled as a full time student in a traditional university. That seems like condemning the child to having little if any social life, and spending most of his or her waking hours with people who at best will regard him/her as a sort of mascot or novelty. It seems to me like in most cases it would be better to send the kid to an academically rigorous private school.
I worked briefly at a private women’s college that had a special program for gifted girls as young as 13. (The dean mentioned during my interview that they’d initially had no age restriction, but soon found that kids under about 13 were not emotionally ready for college.) They took the same classes as everyone else, but they lived together in a separate dorm for at least one year and IIRC until they turned 16. They had a sort of den mother and I think their own academic adviser. They also had organized social activities like field trips and dances with students at prep schools in the area. I’d probably be fine with sending my child to a program like that, although I remember hearing that it was often difficult for these girls once they graduated from college and that many went on to grad school just because they didn’t know what else to do with themselves. Very few employers would prefer a 17 year old with a BA to a 22 year old with a BA, particularly since the 17 year old is unlikely to have much in the way of work experience.
Yeah, no…well, I’ve got a lot to say about this topic.
There was a time in my life when I would have loved to be in this kid’s position. I thought that middle school was obnoxious as Hell and I hated my high school years, so you can imagine that I spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways in order to speed things up a bit instead of finishing out school the normal way. I looked into home-school programs, online academies, the local JC (which I’m actually attending now as an adult)…Hell, I even considered taking CA’s own exit exam at 15 just to get done with it all as early as possible. My parents were not supportive of any of that, however, and ultimately the closest that I got to speeding things up was when I managed to take an extra class in my first semester as a HS freshman, enabling me to get early release during my final two years in high school.
Now, when I graduated I did not go to college right away, not because I wasn’t accepted anywhere but because I didn’t have the $$$ to go where I’d wanted. I spent one year doing absolutely nothing - no school, no work, nada, - and another year working nonstop before I finally enrolled at the local JC. What did that experience teach me? Free time is fucking great but damnit it needs to be earned.
All of which brings me in a roundabout way back to the OP. As a 21 year old adult, it makes absolutely no sense to me at all - again, none whatsoever - why ANYBODY would want to rush through education and college so badly. Even during this last semester, when I took a full load and worked the fucking graveyard shift on top of that, I was taken aback whenever I would run into people taking 20 units or more in the hopes that they might finish early.
I’ll probably be at the JC level for another year or so, and I won’t finish out my BA until I’m 23 or 24 years old. You want to know the difference between me getting a degree at 24 as opposed to this kid getting his degree at 16? I can drive a car, I can get a loan, I can legally drink, I can hold down a job, and my genuine life experiences are in many ways more fulfilling than the story of this savant.
So no, I wouldn’t let any gifted future 2ManyTacos underlings enroll in college at such a young age. There’s really no benefit to doing that as far as I can tell.
But there’s no reason to believe that he’ll stop being in college when he gets his first BA. Most likely he’ll stay and study at least into his early twenties, and he’ll have at leat one Doctoral degree before he’s done. Likely he’ll have a great deal of teaching experience as well.
I don’t think it’s particularly likely that he’ll continue studying non-stop for the next decade, if only because it would be very expensive to do so. Are his parents supposed to pay for that? I also think it’s unlikely that a 15 year old grad student would be chosen as a TA over an older student.