Skipping grades

I skipped a lot of grades when I was young, ultimately starting university at age 15 and law school at age 19. I’m often asked about my experience, usually by parents who are considering having their children do the same.

The context of this question is almost always negative. That is, the parents asking me are almost always focused on the downsides of skipping, rather than the upsides. Meanwhile, their schools are usually also strongly opposed to skipping.¹ (For example, my high school unsuccessfully tried to discourage me from taking the SAT early; after I got a perfect score and won a full university scholarship, they then refused to accelerate me, forcing me to drop out of high school to accept the scholarship.)

Given that I ultimately had a pretty positive experience, I therefore usually end up presenting the following (caveated) case for acceleration.

1. Kids who skip grades do better in life.

The main reason to skip grades is because it results in better long-term outcomes. Longitudinal studies (that is, studies following a cohort of students across decades of their lives) repeatedly show that accelerated students are more likely to pursue advanced degrees, earn more money, publish better-cited research, self-describe as happier, and so on and so on.

Conversely, not skipping grades can be quite unpleasant for gifted kids. School is the vast majority of their day, and spending it playing a trivially easy video game is boring at best, and sets up bad long-term habits at worst.

More cynically, teachers tend to automatically positively stereotype children who skip grades, creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. In school, I was often given the benefit of the doubt by teachers, even when I shouldn’t have been, because of my reputation.

2. Kids who skip grades don’t (really) do worse socially.

For most parents, their most common concern is that an accelerated child won’t fit in with their peers. This is absolutely true: after I skipped, I was very obviously “different” than my peers, and everyone knew it.

But the truth is that I would never have fit in with my peers, regardless of whether I was accelerated or not. I was a profoundly nerdy kid who systematically read the entire World Book encyclopedia every month. Whether or not I was the same age as my classmates was hardly what made me unusual.

I think this is generally true for most children who are eligible for acceleration. Children are remarkably perceptive about each other, free from the ingrained social norms that blinker their adults. A child’s age is one of the last things impacting whether they fit in; if they stand out intellectually, the other children will know. And the scientific literature also supports this, showing that there isn’t much, if any, psychosocial harm associated with acceleration.

However, individual results certainly vary greatly here. Not all children respond well to standing out so overtly. Skipping grades also inevitably requires making new friends. And finally, accelerated kids definitely don’t do as well in age-gated sports: they will often be physically too far behind their peers to compete.

3. Personalized education is the gold standard, but skipping grades is better than nothing.

The best argument against skipping grades is that it doesn’t actually address the root causes of the issues identified above.

• Academically, the problem most gifted children face in school is speed, not content. That is, most gifted children are bored not (just) because they already know the material, but because they learn far faster than their school curriculum can keep up.
  • Grade skipping doesn’t solve this problem. Once the child catches up, they are in the same position they were before: at the front of the class, bored with how slow it’s going.
• Socially, the reason gifted children can be ostracized in school and face social pressures is because they are fundamentally so different from their peers.
  • Grade skipping might not exacerbate this problem, but it also doesn’t solve it. You are still in exactly the same position you were before: surrounded by other children who don’t share your interests or intellectual curiosity.

This is true - and yet, unfortunately, for most parents, I don’t think there’s a better answer. Homeschooling or private/independent schools obviously allows for a more tailored academic or social environment, but these are financially or practically infeasible for many families.

I think a more practical (but still challenging) answer involves a combination of independent self-study and private tutoring to approximate a personalized education. I already mentioned my love of reading encyclopedias; starting in middle school, my father supplemented that by tutoring me in calculus and physics at a pace appropriate to me. Indeed, this is an even more feasible option in the LLM era.

Absent either of those, I think skipping grades is the least bad remaining option. To draw an analogy: if your kids are outgrowing their clothes, bespoke tailoring is of course the ideal solution, but more practically, it’s still better to just size up rather than sticking with age-based sizing.

The point is not that skipping doesn’t come with tradeoffs; it’s that not skipping is itself a decision with significant consequences as well. That is, for most children, the optimal balance of academic and emotional development comes from progressing through school one year at a time. But for particularly academically gifted children, such a decision deserves a bit more scrutiny, and not just the path taken by default.