So you seem to recognize this is an obsession but yet you’re still determined to follow thru on it as if it will somehow fix all your social problems.
Why not try this? Talk it over with a counselor; if your parents won’t take you then there is likely help available thru your school. See if the counselor thinks this solves your problems at one stroke or if perhaps there are other areas you might address.
My DD has an october birthday and our cut off is Sept 30. So she went when she was “supposed” to but one of the oldest in the class. However this was awesome! She got to have a drivers license for two years in HS and was 21 her senior year of college.
My kid just had a big problem - he’s organizing volunteers for some activity in his senior class, but they needed somebody over 18 to supervise. Luckily, they found a classmate who’s over 18 now. Nobody thinks this is weird. Based on your posts, you real issue is your relationship with your parents.
“Only 26 states had September cut-off dates in 2000. The rest varied from June to January.”
I should have been more clear. I want to go to college in a state with a cut-off no later than September 30th. As long as the state wouldn’t have allowed to start until the fall of 2000, I’m fine.
Depending on where you live, the cutoff may not have allowed him to start until he was almost 6, so of course nobody thinks it’s weird.
You just said it. The cutoff was before her birthday. If my state had a September 30th cutoff, I wouldn’t have minded being the oldest either, because I’d be in the grade I was supposed to be in. And btw, I’ve tried beer before and I hate it, so being the 1st to turn 21 won’t be as awesome for me as it is for others.
Hey, your parents were right and even right about you these days if that’s the only reason to go out of state. :))
Nothing will be any different, but go OOS because you’ll feel better about it. It usually costs about $20k more in OOS tuition, but that’s the price you are willing to pay because your parents kept you back for that one day.
Since I plan to go to a pubic university, I get that I will also be starting people who are 19+. But these students only go part time, work during the day, and go to class, as well as live off of campus. I’m probably not going to know any of them at all.
Really? There are NO other 18 year olds in your class in high school? I just find it hard to believe that no one ever repeated a grade, no one else had parents who started them late, no one ever moved in from a state with a July 1, or Aug 1, or Sept 1 cut off. I can’t believe no one in your school had an Oct 2 birth date so was the exact same age as you but for 1 day. Even if no one repeated, moved in, or was born in October, those people WILL be at your OOS school, and there will be plenty of 19 year olds entering as freshmen and living in your dorm.
It’s fine if you want to go OOS. You may be giving up a very good instate college to go to an OOS with not as much to offer.
This is silly. You aren’t considering what it takes to succeed in life, what makes one’s life direction, the good people can do…just your age and being held back, something that happened more than a decade ago. We haven’t discussed grades, achievements, any good you do for others. Just your age. What can you tell us that’s positive? What have you earned? What is your destiny? These are the things that make us strong and worthy individuals. Our resilience and persistence, our goodness. Not a fixed perception your life was ruined by a decidion when you were five.
You have to get up on your horse and ride to your future, not be so immersed in the past. Just the fact of being out of state chages nothing. The one thing you can control is attitude. Think about it.
Not true based on my experience (teaching at university level) or my kid’s experience (as students, with students ranging from 17-mid-20s in their classes). You will have kids of different years never mind ages in your classes. It’s not like HS, where it’s all 1 year in a class- even in 1st year (easy example: sophomores and juniors in other majors who are picking up the science 101 classes they need for pre-med). Plus, the further you get into your major the more time you spend with the other majors in your subject.
You asked a question, and it has been comprehensively answered. You don’t believe the answer, so are going to go forward with applying to OOS public colleges. Some posters have pointed out that it is likely to cost more, but that is between you and your parents.
The key point is @lookingforward’s: no matter where you go to university, what’s going to matter is what you do with the experience. You won’t be able to blame being a few months different in age for feeling as if you don’t fit in.
You don’t have to keep convincing us. It’s not going to happen.
But that doesn’t matter. As long as your parents are OK with your choice, it’ doesn’t matter what we think.
Work instead on finding the right college-- there are LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of factors other than “out of state so I’ll be the same age as more of my classmates than if I go instate.”
What OOS colleges are you looking at?
We can help you find appropriate OOS colleges if you give us your state, budget, and stats.
Note that in your classes, there’ll be a mix of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors. If you go to a LAC you’ll get to know them, if you go to a large university you are unlikely to meet with them unless you make an effort. In both cases I wouldn’t speak about your or their age.
If you want colleges that had a cut off date no later than Sept. 30th, 2000, that brings your options up to a grand total of 27. Are your parents willing to pay for you to go OOS?
If your school was one that had a January 1st, 2001, cut off date, then you started school with the kids whose birthdays are from Jan. 2nd, 2001, to Jan. 1, 2002. You’ll be 18 in Oct, but you’ll have classmates who will turn 18 in Jan, Feb, March, April, May, and June, so you won’t be the only 18-year-old in your class. Multiply that number by the number of school districts in your state and you’ll have an idea of the number of students who will turn 19 their freshman year of college. It’s not a small number. So your premise that you won’t be in the normal age range if you turn 19 as a freshman and people will think it’s “weird” is invalid. I think if you want to go to college OOS you’re going to have to find a better reason than that to convince your parents.
If you tell us your budget, stats, and home state we can try to help you find affordable OOS options. If you want your parents to actually allow you to attend an OOS school, I suspect you’re going to have to come up with more mature reasons than what you assume to be the normal age of the freshman class.
Okay, I admit it. When I posted this question, I was hoping that the vast majority would support my reasoning for wanting to go OOS, so that I could show it to my parents and they would be more convinced. I wasn’t looking for an opinion. I was looking for validation. Thank you for all your responses anyway.