Wizarding population and education outside Hogwarts
I'm trying to piece together some muddled thoughts about wizarding population and society. This comes in two parts: concerning the population of wizarding Britain and Hogwarts, and concerning whether we can find wiggle room for non-Hogwarts educational options.
Fair warning: I'm probably better at math than Rowling, but that is a low bar. (At least one and probably all of her population estimates are probably wrong.) Corrections and better ideas welcome!
Wizarding Population: Oh Dear Maths
Rowling has thrown out various and contradictory population numbers for the wizarding world over the years. First she said Hogwarts had about 1,000 students. Then she lowered this to 600. She’s also said that the wizarding population of the British Isles is around 3,000.
I’m sure anyone can spot a few problems here without breaking a sweat.
First, we would also have to imagine that either Harry has failed to notice between 45 and 100 extra students in his year, or he has failed to notice that his year is 45 to 100 students smaller than average. I sincerely doubt that the war caused so many emigrations, deaths, and delayed childbearings that his year could be that much smaller. And even Harry couldn’t be oblivious enough to notice either of those scenarios. Could he?
Even if he could, though, there’s a bigger problem: Hogwarts has only one teacher per subject. Even assuming wizards are significantly tougher and need less sleep than we mere Muggles, there is just no way in hell that McGonagall is teaching Transfiguration to 1,000 students, never mind doing that and serving as Head of Gryffindor House and Deputy Headmistress. Teaching 600 isn’t much more plausible. We can’t assume big lecture hall scenarios for years other than Harry’s, either. As far as we know, there are no big lecture halls in Hogwarts. And a lot of their classes require practical work, not just lectures. Can anyone honestly see Snape supervising 60 or 100 kids trying to brew potentially-explosive potions at once? Yeah, I didn’t think so. But we can’t assume that each year is split into four or five sections either. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to teach them even if you assume no homework to grade! I don’t think even rampant Time-Turner abuse could make that work.
So, it seems much more likely that Hogwarts has no more than about 300 students, with seventh years acting as teaching assistants to reduce the teachers’ workload to still-crushing but at least vaguely possible levels. The extra “hundreds” of people in the crowds wearing Slytherin green alone at Quidditch games can be explained as players’ relatives and Hogsmeade residents come to see the game. The hundred-ish students Harry sees taking an OWL in Snape's memory can be a combination of (a) Harry overestimating the crowd a bit and (b) NEWT students using the same space for their exam at the same time.
So that’s all right. And it looks like in Muggle Britain, the population cohort aged 10-19 is currently about 11% of the population, so having 300 kids aged 11-18 out of a total population of 3,000 sounds plausible too. Well, except that wizards are supposed to live longer than Muggles on average, so kids ought to form a smaller percentage of the population, but Rowling fails to show this age distribution for the most part anyway, so you can explain that away as wizards being able to live longer but rarely actually doing so. Probably because they all blow themselves up in ridiculous accidents.
Except, a total population of 3,000? When Mrs. Weasley goes looking for Fred and George’s shop, the street number is in the upper 90s, and it isn’t even near the end of the street. Are there 150 shops in Diagon Alley? 200? How many in Knockturn Alley and Hogsmeade? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the state of California has (rounding for convenience) nearly 3,550,000 firms for a population of nearly 40 million, or about 1 firm per 11 people. (Again, rounding.) That ratio-which we can’t necessarily assume would be the same, but let’s for the sake of argument-would argue for about 272 total businesses in a wizarding world of 3,000. So… sure, maybe Diagon Alley has 130 shops, and Knockturn and Hogsmeade have another 140 between them. It could work.
But it’s much harder to explain the Ministry assigning 500 employees to preparing for the Quidditch World Cup full time for a year. To keep the entire government from grinding to a halt, we have to assume that isn’t the entire Ministry workforce, or even close to it, yes? Let’s be generous to the poor employees left behind to cover the regular work and say there’s another 500 of them. Cutting half your workforce for a year is ridiculous, but hey, governments have done far more ridiculous things.
But that would mean that literally a third of the entire population is government employees. That is a hell of a lot. Taking California as an example again, because it has a large and complex bureaucracy, the State Controller’s Office says that there are a total of 233,044 active employees-including part time and intermittent employees. Out of a population of nearly 40 million, that makes for under 0.6% of the population on the state payroll. (I’m ignoring local and federal government employees because the wizarding world only seems to have one level of government. If they have local governments for Hogsmeade and the Alleys, they’re likely to be so tiny as not to alter the final tallies much.) There is a huge gulf between 0.6% and 33% which isn’t easy to explain even if the wizarding economy and society are structured far more differently from California’s than one would think. Just how many Obliviators do they have on staff? How many useless sinecures? How do they pay all these people?
I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of 1,000 people working for the government, 300-500 running or working in businesses, 600 in school, and the final 1,000-ish being either young children, retirees, or homemakers. And, oh yeah, having an entire modern “nation” of only 3,000 people to begin with.
And weren’t there supposed to be about 100,000 people at the Quidditch World Cup? Unless Britain has a far smaller magical population relative to non-magical than anywhere else, that would have to mean that something like a third of the entire wizarding population of the world attended a single sports game. I know they’re starved for culture and this is one of their only entertainments, but come on.
Now, wizarding Britain can’t be vastly larger than 3,000 people. It’s still tiny by Muggle standards. You could probably argue for as high as 30,000, but somewhere between 9,000 and 15,000 seems more likely based on what we see. Which would make around 600 people of Hogwarts age sound just about plausible if you also assume a greater number of elderly than in Muggle society.
Except there can’t be 600 students at Hogwarts, as we established. So where are they hiding the extra kids?
Alternative Education
Rowling has also claimed that Hogwarts is the only school of magic in Britain, and Harry probably would have noticed if the Hogwarts Quidditch teams were frequently playing against another school. So fine, no other British schools of magic.
But one of my schools had an annual sophistry contest, which turns out to have its advantages. Let’s split some hairs. What exactly do you mean by “a school”?
Suppose a reasonably skilled witch or wizard (or one who claims to be) hangs out a shingle as a magical educator. Students meet in the teacher’s house, or a magical pub, or a convenient field or rented storefront, and stay as long as they can pay. Maybe the teacher has a partner to help with the admin work, or there are two or three teachers who come and go as their life circumstances dictate. They teach what they think is useful and what their customers want. There’s no fixed institutional structure, no permanent address, and no expectation that it will continue indefinitely. Is this “a school”? Maybe not. Certainly not according to Hogwarts, a History.
(Incidentally, I imagine this is about how Hogwarts started out, which is why the Sorting Hat can’t give a specific date for the school’s founding. When did it transition from being four skilled magic-workers passing on knowledge to some favored disciples in an informal fashion to being an institution? If it was a gradual process, who can say?)
You can see why some families might prefer this arrangement. Not all wizards have stacks of gold in their family vaults, or belong to the civil servant class and are willing to sacrifice the possibility of their children contributing to the family economy in hopes that Hogwarts attendance will give them greater opportunities. Some probably depend on their kids getting jobs when they’re fourteen or fifteen to keep the family afloat. Or younger, even. Such families might send their kids to Hogwarts for a couple of years, even through OWLs-but then again, it might be even more convenient if the kids could live at home, attend lessons in the morning, and work in the afternoons. Or look after their younger siblings and cook dinner so their parents can work.
Then there’s the tradition of apprenticeship. If your family have been members of the Worshipful Company of Broomwrights for centuries, and they expect you to take up the family business-or your family have been sweeping the floor for the broomwrights and have finally gotten you an apprenticeship so you can move up in the world-do they want you to spend seven years learning to make pineapples tap-dance before you start learning your craft? Can they even afford to lose your labor for seven years? Maybe. But maybe not. Such families might want their children to focus on useful, practical spells related to their craft and daily life: broom- or wand-making or whatever, summoning objects, cleaning, cooking. Who has time to waste learning to turn rats into water goblets?
And of course there are always people who have different educational needs or priorities. We’re led to believe that if Dumbledore hadn’t made special arrangements for Lupin, then Lupin would have been home-schooled. No doubt there are other kids who are chronically ill or have some other reason (including exceptionally controlling parents) they can’t attend boarding school. Others might be deeply religious, or belong to different magical traditions, and their parents want their educations to emphasize those aspects. Maybe some of those small not-school tutoring groups are religious, or teach in the Irish bardic tradition.
If a fair number of children use these alternate arrangements instead of attending Hogwarts (or at least, instead of staying in Hogwarts more than a couple of years), that would also provide a larger market for those Kwikspell correspondence courses.
How do these children become qualified witches and wizards without taking OWLs, if they do?
There might be an alternate testing track. Apprentices might qualify by graduating to journeyman level, or that plus passing a test of some general basic skills. Attendees of the not-technically-schools and homeschool students might have a more extensive basic skills test. There might even be intermediate levels of qualification, like “qualified to perform spells related to one’s trade on business premises and use magic at home, but not in the street except in emergencies.”
The books do seem to show a strong national tradition of Hogwarts attendance-but then again, most of the adults Harry meets who talk about their Hogwarts days or mention a House affiliation are teachers, civil servants, and/or rich. We don’t see many-or any?-wizarding-raised, working-class kids at Hogwarts. (Snape as a literal half-blood is the closest, but we don’t know his mother’s class background. Whatever it was, she probably had, ahem, ambitions for his future. You’d better be in Slytherin!) So if there were a couple hundred kids not at Hogwarts, or if whoever manufactured Harry’s cauldron didn’t go to Hogwarts, how would Harry know?
So while it’s not required that there be a substantial non-Hogwarts-attending population, it’s at least possible. All that’s required is that the Hogwarts set be culturally and socially dominant. Which, if the non-Hogwarts (and early-Hogwarts-leavers) set is mostly working-class with a few artisans and religious minorities, they would be.
So, if you want, you can have a total wizarding population of 9,500, a Hogwarts population of 300, and a couple hundred more kids of Hogwarts-age kids apprenticing and/or attending regular, trade, and bardic not-technically-schools. If you’re really good, you could probably even make a population of 15,000 and several hundred more non-Hogwarts kids work, though that sounds more difficult. But why should difficulty stop a dedicated theorist or fanficcer?
There are probably even more possibilities for, er, massaging Rowling’s numbers into something plausible and dramatically satisfying. I’d love to hear them!
Fair warning: I'm probably better at math than Rowling, but that is a low bar. (At least one and probably all of her population estimates are probably wrong.) Corrections and better ideas welcome!
Wizarding Population: Oh Dear Maths
Rowling has thrown out various and contradictory population numbers for the wizarding world over the years. First she said Hogwarts had about 1,000 students. Then she lowered this to 600. She’s also said that the wizarding population of the British Isles is around 3,000.
I’m sure anyone can spot a few problems here without breaking a sweat.
First, we would also have to imagine that either Harry has failed to notice between 45 and 100 extra students in his year, or he has failed to notice that his year is 45 to 100 students smaller than average. I sincerely doubt that the war caused so many emigrations, deaths, and delayed childbearings that his year could be that much smaller. And even Harry couldn’t be oblivious enough to notice either of those scenarios. Could he?
Even if he could, though, there’s a bigger problem: Hogwarts has only one teacher per subject. Even assuming wizards are significantly tougher and need less sleep than we mere Muggles, there is just no way in hell that McGonagall is teaching Transfiguration to 1,000 students, never mind doing that and serving as Head of Gryffindor House and Deputy Headmistress. Teaching 600 isn’t much more plausible. We can’t assume big lecture hall scenarios for years other than Harry’s, either. As far as we know, there are no big lecture halls in Hogwarts. And a lot of their classes require practical work, not just lectures. Can anyone honestly see Snape supervising 60 or 100 kids trying to brew potentially-explosive potions at once? Yeah, I didn’t think so. But we can’t assume that each year is split into four or five sections either. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to teach them even if you assume no homework to grade! I don’t think even rampant Time-Turner abuse could make that work.
So, it seems much more likely that Hogwarts has no more than about 300 students, with seventh years acting as teaching assistants to reduce the teachers’ workload to still-crushing but at least vaguely possible levels. The extra “hundreds” of people in the crowds wearing Slytherin green alone at Quidditch games can be explained as players’ relatives and Hogsmeade residents come to see the game. The hundred-ish students Harry sees taking an OWL in Snape's memory can be a combination of (a) Harry overestimating the crowd a bit and (b) NEWT students using the same space for their exam at the same time.
So that’s all right. And it looks like in Muggle Britain, the population cohort aged 10-19 is currently about 11% of the population, so having 300 kids aged 11-18 out of a total population of 3,000 sounds plausible too. Well, except that wizards are supposed to live longer than Muggles on average, so kids ought to form a smaller percentage of the population, but Rowling fails to show this age distribution for the most part anyway, so you can explain that away as wizards being able to live longer but rarely actually doing so. Probably because they all blow themselves up in ridiculous accidents.
Except, a total population of 3,000? When Mrs. Weasley goes looking for Fred and George’s shop, the street number is in the upper 90s, and it isn’t even near the end of the street. Are there 150 shops in Diagon Alley? 200? How many in Knockturn Alley and Hogsmeade? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the state of California has (rounding for convenience) nearly 3,550,000 firms for a population of nearly 40 million, or about 1 firm per 11 people. (Again, rounding.) That ratio-which we can’t necessarily assume would be the same, but let’s for the sake of argument-would argue for about 272 total businesses in a wizarding world of 3,000. So… sure, maybe Diagon Alley has 130 shops, and Knockturn and Hogsmeade have another 140 between them. It could work.
But it’s much harder to explain the Ministry assigning 500 employees to preparing for the Quidditch World Cup full time for a year. To keep the entire government from grinding to a halt, we have to assume that isn’t the entire Ministry workforce, or even close to it, yes? Let’s be generous to the poor employees left behind to cover the regular work and say there’s another 500 of them. Cutting half your workforce for a year is ridiculous, but hey, governments have done far more ridiculous things.
But that would mean that literally a third of the entire population is government employees. That is a hell of a lot. Taking California as an example again, because it has a large and complex bureaucracy, the State Controller’s Office says that there are a total of 233,044 active employees-including part time and intermittent employees. Out of a population of nearly 40 million, that makes for under 0.6% of the population on the state payroll. (I’m ignoring local and federal government employees because the wizarding world only seems to have one level of government. If they have local governments for Hogsmeade and the Alleys, they’re likely to be so tiny as not to alter the final tallies much.) There is a huge gulf between 0.6% and 33% which isn’t easy to explain even if the wizarding economy and society are structured far more differently from California’s than one would think. Just how many Obliviators do they have on staff? How many useless sinecures? How do they pay all these people?
I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of 1,000 people working for the government, 300-500 running or working in businesses, 600 in school, and the final 1,000-ish being either young children, retirees, or homemakers. And, oh yeah, having an entire modern “nation” of only 3,000 people to begin with.
And weren’t there supposed to be about 100,000 people at the Quidditch World Cup? Unless Britain has a far smaller magical population relative to non-magical than anywhere else, that would have to mean that something like a third of the entire wizarding population of the world attended a single sports game. I know they’re starved for culture and this is one of their only entertainments, but come on.
Now, wizarding Britain can’t be vastly larger than 3,000 people. It’s still tiny by Muggle standards. You could probably argue for as high as 30,000, but somewhere between 9,000 and 15,000 seems more likely based on what we see. Which would make around 600 people of Hogwarts age sound just about plausible if you also assume a greater number of elderly than in Muggle society.
Except there can’t be 600 students at Hogwarts, as we established. So where are they hiding the extra kids?
Alternative Education
Rowling has also claimed that Hogwarts is the only school of magic in Britain, and Harry probably would have noticed if the Hogwarts Quidditch teams were frequently playing against another school. So fine, no other British schools of magic.
But one of my schools had an annual sophistry contest, which turns out to have its advantages. Let’s split some hairs. What exactly do you mean by “a school”?
Suppose a reasonably skilled witch or wizard (or one who claims to be) hangs out a shingle as a magical educator. Students meet in the teacher’s house, or a magical pub, or a convenient field or rented storefront, and stay as long as they can pay. Maybe the teacher has a partner to help with the admin work, or there are two or three teachers who come and go as their life circumstances dictate. They teach what they think is useful and what their customers want. There’s no fixed institutional structure, no permanent address, and no expectation that it will continue indefinitely. Is this “a school”? Maybe not. Certainly not according to Hogwarts, a History.
(Incidentally, I imagine this is about how Hogwarts started out, which is why the Sorting Hat can’t give a specific date for the school’s founding. When did it transition from being four skilled magic-workers passing on knowledge to some favored disciples in an informal fashion to being an institution? If it was a gradual process, who can say?)
You can see why some families might prefer this arrangement. Not all wizards have stacks of gold in their family vaults, or belong to the civil servant class and are willing to sacrifice the possibility of their children contributing to the family economy in hopes that Hogwarts attendance will give them greater opportunities. Some probably depend on their kids getting jobs when they’re fourteen or fifteen to keep the family afloat. Or younger, even. Such families might send their kids to Hogwarts for a couple of years, even through OWLs-but then again, it might be even more convenient if the kids could live at home, attend lessons in the morning, and work in the afternoons. Or look after their younger siblings and cook dinner so their parents can work.
Then there’s the tradition of apprenticeship. If your family have been members of the Worshipful Company of Broomwrights for centuries, and they expect you to take up the family business-or your family have been sweeping the floor for the broomwrights and have finally gotten you an apprenticeship so you can move up in the world-do they want you to spend seven years learning to make pineapples tap-dance before you start learning your craft? Can they even afford to lose your labor for seven years? Maybe. But maybe not. Such families might want their children to focus on useful, practical spells related to their craft and daily life: broom- or wand-making or whatever, summoning objects, cleaning, cooking. Who has time to waste learning to turn rats into water goblets?
And of course there are always people who have different educational needs or priorities. We’re led to believe that if Dumbledore hadn’t made special arrangements for Lupin, then Lupin would have been home-schooled. No doubt there are other kids who are chronically ill or have some other reason (including exceptionally controlling parents) they can’t attend boarding school. Others might be deeply religious, or belong to different magical traditions, and their parents want their educations to emphasize those aspects. Maybe some of those small not-school tutoring groups are religious, or teach in the Irish bardic tradition.
If a fair number of children use these alternate arrangements instead of attending Hogwarts (or at least, instead of staying in Hogwarts more than a couple of years), that would also provide a larger market for those Kwikspell correspondence courses.
How do these children become qualified witches and wizards without taking OWLs, if they do?
There might be an alternate testing track. Apprentices might qualify by graduating to journeyman level, or that plus passing a test of some general basic skills. Attendees of the not-technically-schools and homeschool students might have a more extensive basic skills test. There might even be intermediate levels of qualification, like “qualified to perform spells related to one’s trade on business premises and use magic at home, but not in the street except in emergencies.”
The books do seem to show a strong national tradition of Hogwarts attendance-but then again, most of the adults Harry meets who talk about their Hogwarts days or mention a House affiliation are teachers, civil servants, and/or rich. We don’t see many-or any?-wizarding-raised, working-class kids at Hogwarts. (Snape as a literal half-blood is the closest, but we don’t know his mother’s class background. Whatever it was, she probably had, ahem, ambitions for his future. You’d better be in Slytherin!) So if there were a couple hundred kids not at Hogwarts, or if whoever manufactured Harry’s cauldron didn’t go to Hogwarts, how would Harry know?
So while it’s not required that there be a substantial non-Hogwarts-attending population, it’s at least possible. All that’s required is that the Hogwarts set be culturally and socially dominant. Which, if the non-Hogwarts (and early-Hogwarts-leavers) set is mostly working-class with a few artisans and religious minorities, they would be.
So, if you want, you can have a total wizarding population of 9,500, a Hogwarts population of 300, and a couple hundred more kids of Hogwarts-age kids apprenticing and/or attending regular, trade, and bardic not-technically-schools. If you’re really good, you could probably even make a population of 15,000 and several hundred more non-Hogwarts kids work, though that sounds more difficult. But why should difficulty stop a dedicated theorist or fanficcer?
There are probably even more possibilities for, er, massaging Rowling’s numbers into something plausible and dramatically satisfying. I’d love to hear them!