So Exactly how many students ARE there at Hogwartz?

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 191556



--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Bart Lidofsky <bart at ...> wrote:
>
> On 12/19/2011 3:25 PM, sigurd at ... wrote:
> > Now for the fun part. If we assume that Hogwarts matriculates pretty much everyone they take in (disregarding  those students petrified, killed, transformed, driven mad, folded, stapled, spindled and mutilated) then we have to assume the replacements year to year equal the graduates or 1/7 of the total or 400/7 = 60 new students each year.  Note that we never hear of someone getting expelled, or deciding that he'd rather be a CPA than a wizard, or going off to study pottery making from the Uke-Uke-Fiduke people in Bongo Congo) and so we can assume the population is pretty stable.
> 
> Bart:
>      It appears like it's more like 40 or so students each year attend 
> Hogwarts (4-6 of each gender in each house)..

Pippin:
This is one of those issues where JKR has simply thrown her hands in the air and admitted that there's no way to get the numbers to reconcile.  

She decided she'd need forty named students in Harry's year to tell the story, and so at some point long before the first book was published she sat down and made a list of them. They weren't supposed to be *only*  forty first years. She thought the school itself had about a thousand students and that's the number she gave in interviews. But she never worked out the discrepancies.  There's no telling where all the "extra" students are supposed to sleep and so on -- her mind, she says, doesn't work like that. 

We debated it all merrily in the days before JKR basically told us to give it up -- I even wrote a Filk about it. 

http://www.harrypotterfilks.com/students/hogwarts.htm#How_Many_Students

Pippin