Number of Hogwarts students, Wizard baby boom

[breegenie]

No: HPFGUIDX 31527


In repsonse to rachelrenee1's post:

Welcome from another relative newbie (I joined just before the 
probabtion stuff). :) A very nicely analyzed first post.

I too, have been fascinated by the numbers argument.
I think both parts of your argument work and dovetail with a theory 
of my own about baby booms. 

> 1) Think back to your high school. There are a lot of groups of 
kids 
> right? In thinking of mine there were 1) the rank and file 
> hardworkers who got little attention in and of themselves. This was 
> most of the student body. I would call them Hufflepuffs. 

Hard-working, but not stellar, students, make up the majority of most 
schools. Probably about 1/2 of my school.

2) There were the gifted and talented kids in honors classes. A 
smaller group than the first, but still, a pretty big number. I would 
call these the Ravenclaws. 

This was a relatively smaller group in my education. Maybe 1/8 the 
population...

3) The kids everyone steered clear of. We called them the stoners. 
You know, the ones who fight, skip class, etc. The "bad" kids. Not as 
big a group as 1 or 2. I would point these out as the Slyterins. 

This group was a little larger, maybe 1/4.

4) Those kids who were the ones everyone wanted to be. Good kids that 
all the students liked (maybe not the stoners) and all the teachers 
enjoyed having in their classes. I would call these "above and 
beyond" students the Griffindors.

These were the scholar athletes, and popular people. Probably another 
1/8, perhaps a bit less.

>So I think 
> that the distribution of students in houses is not necessarly 
> proportional.

Makes sense to me.

> And 2) I think that the number of students each year varies, as it 
> does in a real life school. So I think some years would be big and 
some smaller. 

Absolutely. In my school of 1500+, my class was 372, but other years 
classes were much larger (500+). They had to hire extra 9th grade 
teacher one year because the incoming class was much larger. Some 
years the school held just under 1500, other years closer to 1700.

> I believe that Harry's year would be really, really small. Mainly 
> because the year he was born would have been a fairly bad year for 
> having kids. What with the wizarding world in complete chaos with 
> Voldemort at the height of his powers, <snip> hence a very small 
class eleven years 
> later.  

Absolutely possible. In fact, there may have been a boom post-Voldie. 
After all, there tend to be mini-booms after major bad events (poor 
economy, blizzards, hurricanes, etc.) In fact, some are even 
speculating that pregnancy rates have risen post-Sept 11th because 
people needed a life-affirming moment of intimacy...

So, is there any canon evidence that maybe Ginny's class or the 
Creevey's Griffyndor classes are larger than Harry's? 

Bree