Lack of traditional academics...

[joanne0012]

No: HPFGUIDX 33949

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., Andrew MacIan <andrew_macian at y...> wrote:

> > It may be that the population of the wizarding world
> > is too small to 
> > support a university.
> 
> 
> Erm.  The lady across the table from me is a
> geneticist; her take is that, given a gene pool the
> size of the (current) US, there should be nearly 300k
> people who qualify as 'magical'.

In reality, we know nothing of wizarding "genetics" except that squibs are rare 
and the spontaneous appearance of wizarding skills is not (witness the several 
muggle-borns in Harry's class).  Everything else is speculation and extrapolation.  
We don't even know whether wizarding skills are physically inherited rather than 
caused by some other mechanism.

I don't want to get into the whole population debate again, but even given the 
higher-end estimate of 1000 students at Hogwarts and a wizarding lifetime of 
150 years, that yields an estimate of 22,000 wizards in Britain.  Since their 
population is about one-fifth that of the US, that would yield a US population of 
100,000 wizards.  Epidemiology, not genetics!