Was Harry's year unusually small?
I must be on a "lost causes" kick this year...
I accepted for years that Harry’s year must have significantly fewer students than normal, because (a) he was conceived at or at least right before the very height of the war, and (b) we see “over a hundred” students in the Great Hall in Snape’s memory of his DADA OWL, which makes it sound like the Marauders’ year was much bigger.
I’m no longer sure that this is such a solid conclusion, however.
Were There Sufficient Reasons for a Lower Birth Rate?
First, this wasn’t a war in the same sense as, say, World War II or the Vietnam War, with soldiers off at the front, physically separated from their spouses and lovers. Everyone was home and able to botch their contraceptive charms or potions. Or to actively decide to have children.
Second, we don’t know whether the war looked fierce enough to put people off having babies when Harry was conceived, in autumn 1979. The only deaths we know about are from summer 1981. Also, Harry was born only a month before the cutoff point between his year-cohort and the next, so most of the kids in his year would have been conceived and born earlier than he was. Earlier in 1979, things may have looked tense, but not yet so dangerous that people changed their childbearing plans. If escalating violence did cause a drop in the number of conceptions, it might not have happened until after Harry’s. This could result in Ginny’s year and the one following (or even just the latter) being smaller than average-but not Harry’s. We really have no way of knowing exactly at what date the war might have scared people into delaying childbearing. If it ever did, which leads to…
Third, we don’t know that a gang/civil war would scare witches and wizards into delaying childbearing. It seems logical that with violence increasing, wizards would decide not to create children who might suffer from that-but they might be operating from a different set of priorities. I ran across an interesting comment by tonks-is-cool which posits the opposite reaction:
Well, I reckon it's actually the other way around!
It was high time to start a family. Desperate times. Because Frank Longbottoms, James Potter and Lucius Malfoy were each one (at least as far as we know from the books, the interviews and the Black Family Tree) the very LAST ONES of their more or less ancient pure-blood lines. They each absolutely needed an heir before they were possibly seriously injured or even killed in combat! For they were all fighters, warriors for their respective cause in that civil war dividing the wizarding world […]
So I do understand why Lucius and Narcissa would have been very eager to finally get a child, at least one; for similar reasons as the Potters and Longbottoms. To not have their line die out…
Could some witches and wizards have reacted to the war by deciding to have more children rather than fewer? Was that a factor in why the Weasleys have seven children, for example? Again, we don’t have enough information. But it's possible. And of course, witches and wizards might make different decisions. Maybe the number who decided to put off having children was exactly balanced by those who decided to have more to ensure their line would continue or to provide more fighters for the cause.
Okay, what about those prevented from having children by circumstances outside their control-like dying? What about those who moved abroad to get away from the conflict and had their children outside the Hogwarts catchment area?
Because we don’t know that the number of deaths was very high before 1981, we also don’t know that people who otherwise would have had children in Harry’s year died and thus shrank the class size. Maybe they did-but maybe they didn’t. Similarly, we don’t know whether things looked dire enough for families to move abroad to get away from the conflict. It’s possible that wizarding deaths were mainly confined to Death Eaters, Aurors, Order members, and possibly high-ranking Ministry officials-and maybe most of those deaths were the ones we heard about, in 1981. Any deaths (or relocations) of potential parents might have affected the years after Harry’s, and Harry’s very little or not at all.
None of this is to say that it’s impossible for the war to have reduced the number of children in Harry’s year-just that we can’t be certain that it did. Or how much it did, if it did. Just about any scenario you please could be consistent with canon.
Doing the Math
So, what about the evidence of the Marauders’ year?
First, Harry mentions that both fifth- and seventh-years wait around in the Great Hall before his own OWLs, so it’s likely that the Marauders’ year also had an OWL and a NEWT sharing space. Some of the students in the memory were not in the Marauders’ year at all.
Second, Harry, like most human beings, probably isn’t great at estimating large crowd sizes. His estimate of the number of Death Eaters in the graveyard in GoF might be reliable: it’s smaller, and Harry had several minutes and good motivation to size up his opposition as Voldemort walked around naming a bunch of them. But a glance at a crowded room when he’s distracted by the memories of his father and Snape? All we can say for sure is that he saw “lots” of students. “Over a hundred” could in fact be “eighty-five.” The Great Hall in the memory might hold more OWL-level students than his own year plus some NEWT students, but possibly not, since he hasn’t sat his own OWLs yet and doesn’t know how crowded the Great Hall will look.
Either way, we have no reason to think that the Marauders’ year was average. If their year was larger, maybe they’re the outlier, not Harry’s year. For all we know, the Marauders’ year had four sets of twins, and also a bunch of the parents attended the same party where there was An Incident which interfered with their contraception. Or maybe there was an exceptionally nasty cold going around the winter when many in that year were conceived, and Pepper-up Potion interferes with wizarding contraception (similarly to how antibiotics can interfere with hormonal contraception). We could come up with any number of reasons that year might have been larger than average through sheer chance. With such small class sizes, small variations in year-cohort size matter. Having 260 instead of 240 students might not be terribly noticeable, but 70 instead of 40 very much is.
So we can’t conclude anything about normal class size based on the Marauders’ year alone. Nor do I think we can rely on things like Harry’s impression of “two hundred” Quidditch spectators in Slytherin green: again, we have no reason to think he’s better than average at estimating crowd sizes, and anyway that crowd might include relatives or villagers. Ditto for the “hundred” thestral-drawn carriages.
Is there anything that might tilt the scales in favor of either the Marauders’ or Harry’s year being closer to “normal” for Hogwarts in their respective eras?
Yes, there is, at least for the 1990s: staff size.
We know there is only one teacher per required class. (Otherwise, Harry would have cursed not getting the other Potions teacher instead of Snape.) How many classes can one person teach during a school week?
Harry’s year is split into two sections. There are around 20 brooms for the combined Gryffindor/Slytherin flying lesson and around 20 earmuffs for the combined Gryffindor/Hufflepuff Herbology lesson (the smaller the number, the better the chance that Harry's estimate is reliable), which strongly suggests that Harry’s year has around 40 students (unless there are a lot more Ravenclaws that year). It’s possible that not every student from the given Houses is included in those sections, and that in fact Harry’s year is larger and split into more than two sections-except as we’ll see, it really isn’t.
Let’s assume that Years 1 through 5 are usually split into two sections, and NEWT students can all fit into one class. That means each teacher has twelve classes total. If they teach each class for three hours per week, that’s 36 hours. That’s a full-time job even before you add the prep, grading, remedial lessons, career advice sessions, patrolling for monsters… Plus, the school day seems to run from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., making 35 available teaching hours. So already we have to assume that the teachers are all using Time-Turners just to fit their classes in and have time for lunch. Okay, let’s arbitrarily assume that the lower years start at 8:00, making 40 available teaching hours. Now at least they get lunch breaks four out of five days per week…
This rules out year-cohorts being split into more than two classes as a regular occurrence. They just cannot fit that many classes into a day. Even one year out of seven having three class sections would be difficult. (At least we know why McGonagall was handing out class schedules after classes had started in HBP: constructing a schedule which lets every student attend all of their classes without conflicts must be a devil of a job. And see why she petitioned the Ministry for Hermione’s time-turner? The girl would have broken the schedule otherwise!)
So, how many students can they teach in one class?
If Harry’s year has 40 students, then teachers do not teach 40 students at once. Otherwise, they would teach Harry’s year in one group instead of making the schedule harder by splitting them.
Harry’s classes all seem to be around 20 students, except for that DADA lesson in OotP when he thinks there are 30 students watching his argument with Umbridge. After years of sitting in classes of 20, Harry can probably tell when there are more than 20 students in the room. Only Gryffindors are mentioned in that scene, so we don’t know which House or Houses they share the class with. If there are 10 Gryffindors and 17 Ravenclaws, maybe there are actually 27 students in the class, and Harry is rounding. (In this case, maybe the teachers could handle 40 students at once, but not 47.) Alternatively, maybe several students from Harry’s year have left Hogwarts by OotP (to home-school or move abroad, maybe because their parents are getting worried that there’s been a murderer or monster running amok every year for four straight years), and this is a class of 33 containing every remaining student in the year. If the latter, at least that would help with the scheduling.
We don’t know which scenario is true. Let’s split the difference and set the maximum number of students in a classroom as 35. That makes 70 about the highest number of students per year which the teachers could handle without massive Time-Turner abuse.
So if the Marauders’ year was over 70, either it was unusually large, or Hogwarts used to have two teachers per required subject and the number of students has been lower enough for long enough that they stopped needing those teachers several years ago. (By “needing,” I mean “is it physically possible to do without them,” not “does it provide the best education for the students and a humane schedule for the teachers.”) They would have to have lost the second set of teachers at least a few years ago; otherwise the retired/laid off/mysteriously vanished teachers would still be news when Harry started school. Students would be complaining that they miss Teacher X, who was so much better than McGonagall/Snape/Binns/etc.
But how likely is that? If the birthrate had fallen so sharply for so long, Ron wouldn’t be saying that wizards would have died out if they hadn’t married Muggles; he’d be saying that they will die out if they don’t all marry Muggles and have lots of babies as soon as humanly possible. Or if the birthrate is fine but half the students who would ordinarily go to Hogwarts had suddenly started homeschooling instead, you’d expect that drastic change to be news too. In Rita’s articles as evidence of Dumbledore’s failure as a headmaster, for example.
Furthermore, everyone speaks of having trouble filling “the” DADA position for the past 30 years. If Dumbledore had spent decades trying to fill two vacant positions, that ought to be notable enough to mention. And it would have been harder for everyone to miss that something odd was happening. We also have no evidence that Merrythought had a DADA-teaching colleague who was the first to fall victim to the curse when Voldemort didn’t get hired alongside them. Everything suggests that there has only been one DADA teacher since at least the 1940s. If the DADA Department had only one teacher while the others had two, this also would be notable enough for someone to mention over the course of six years, probably with the double workload as the reason they couldn’t keep a teacher for longer than a year. It seems more likely that there has only been one teacher per required subject for at least 40 years. (Other than the very, very brief overlap Rowling claims for McGonagall and Dumbledore as co-Transfiguration teachers in 1957 in that Pottermore essay. And let’s not start on the new McGonagall-timeline complications introduced by the FB movies).
Conclusions
Therefore, year-cohorts probably aren’t usually larger than 70, and might usually be smaller. Remember, classroom hours are only about half of a teacher’s total work hours. If they’re in the classroom for 36 hours per week, that makes for a 72-hour work week. I really can’t see Slughorn putting up with such a brutal schedule for decades on end no matter how much influence and candied pineapple he gets out of it, can you? Probably they usually have fewer students and so spend less time grading essays. And maybe they teach some classes for fewer than three hours per week. Maybe they only work, say, 54-hour weeks.
Under this scenario, the average year-cohort might be around 55, plus or minus 20 students in any given year. This would make the Marauders’ year unusually large. (Maybe the teachers being especially stretched is another reason they couldn’t handle the troublemakers.) It would put Harry’s year on the smaller side, but not shockingly so. If his year was always destined to be a bit smaller side through normal variation, a few parents dying or moving abroad or putting off having children would make a big difference. Say there would have been 47 students, and they got 40 instead. And maybe Ginny’s year and the one following got hit hardest, and have 34 or 35 students each.
This may not match whatever fuzzy idea Rowling had, but I think it fits what we actually see in the books. As much as anything can match the vague, inconsistent evidence, anyway.
I accepted for years that Harry’s year must have significantly fewer students than normal, because (a) he was conceived at or at least right before the very height of the war, and (b) we see “over a hundred” students in the Great Hall in Snape’s memory of his DADA OWL, which makes it sound like the Marauders’ year was much bigger.
I’m no longer sure that this is such a solid conclusion, however.
Were There Sufficient Reasons for a Lower Birth Rate?
First, this wasn’t a war in the same sense as, say, World War II or the Vietnam War, with soldiers off at the front, physically separated from their spouses and lovers. Everyone was home and able to botch their contraceptive charms or potions. Or to actively decide to have children.
Second, we don’t know whether the war looked fierce enough to put people off having babies when Harry was conceived, in autumn 1979. The only deaths we know about are from summer 1981. Also, Harry was born only a month before the cutoff point between his year-cohort and the next, so most of the kids in his year would have been conceived and born earlier than he was. Earlier in 1979, things may have looked tense, but not yet so dangerous that people changed their childbearing plans. If escalating violence did cause a drop in the number of conceptions, it might not have happened until after Harry’s. This could result in Ginny’s year and the one following (or even just the latter) being smaller than average-but not Harry’s. We really have no way of knowing exactly at what date the war might have scared people into delaying childbearing. If it ever did, which leads to…
Third, we don’t know that a gang/civil war would scare witches and wizards into delaying childbearing. It seems logical that with violence increasing, wizards would decide not to create children who might suffer from that-but they might be operating from a different set of priorities. I ran across an interesting comment by tonks-is-cool which posits the opposite reaction:
Well, I reckon it's actually the other way around!
It was high time to start a family. Desperate times. Because Frank Longbottoms, James Potter and Lucius Malfoy were each one (at least as far as we know from the books, the interviews and the Black Family Tree) the very LAST ONES of their more or less ancient pure-blood lines. They each absolutely needed an heir before they were possibly seriously injured or even killed in combat! For they were all fighters, warriors for their respective cause in that civil war dividing the wizarding world […]
So I do understand why Lucius and Narcissa would have been very eager to finally get a child, at least one; for similar reasons as the Potters and Longbottoms. To not have their line die out…
Could some witches and wizards have reacted to the war by deciding to have more children rather than fewer? Was that a factor in why the Weasleys have seven children, for example? Again, we don’t have enough information. But it's possible. And of course, witches and wizards might make different decisions. Maybe the number who decided to put off having children was exactly balanced by those who decided to have more to ensure their line would continue or to provide more fighters for the cause.
Okay, what about those prevented from having children by circumstances outside their control-like dying? What about those who moved abroad to get away from the conflict and had their children outside the Hogwarts catchment area?
Because we don’t know that the number of deaths was very high before 1981, we also don’t know that people who otherwise would have had children in Harry’s year died and thus shrank the class size. Maybe they did-but maybe they didn’t. Similarly, we don’t know whether things looked dire enough for families to move abroad to get away from the conflict. It’s possible that wizarding deaths were mainly confined to Death Eaters, Aurors, Order members, and possibly high-ranking Ministry officials-and maybe most of those deaths were the ones we heard about, in 1981. Any deaths (or relocations) of potential parents might have affected the years after Harry’s, and Harry’s very little or not at all.
None of this is to say that it’s impossible for the war to have reduced the number of children in Harry’s year-just that we can’t be certain that it did. Or how much it did, if it did. Just about any scenario you please could be consistent with canon.
Doing the Math
So, what about the evidence of the Marauders’ year?
First, Harry mentions that both fifth- and seventh-years wait around in the Great Hall before his own OWLs, so it’s likely that the Marauders’ year also had an OWL and a NEWT sharing space. Some of the students in the memory were not in the Marauders’ year at all.
Second, Harry, like most human beings, probably isn’t great at estimating large crowd sizes. His estimate of the number of Death Eaters in the graveyard in GoF might be reliable: it’s smaller, and Harry had several minutes and good motivation to size up his opposition as Voldemort walked around naming a bunch of them. But a glance at a crowded room when he’s distracted by the memories of his father and Snape? All we can say for sure is that he saw “lots” of students. “Over a hundred” could in fact be “eighty-five.” The Great Hall in the memory might hold more OWL-level students than his own year plus some NEWT students, but possibly not, since he hasn’t sat his own OWLs yet and doesn’t know how crowded the Great Hall will look.
Either way, we have no reason to think that the Marauders’ year was average. If their year was larger, maybe they’re the outlier, not Harry’s year. For all we know, the Marauders’ year had four sets of twins, and also a bunch of the parents attended the same party where there was An Incident which interfered with their contraception. Or maybe there was an exceptionally nasty cold going around the winter when many in that year were conceived, and Pepper-up Potion interferes with wizarding contraception (similarly to how antibiotics can interfere with hormonal contraception). We could come up with any number of reasons that year might have been larger than average through sheer chance. With such small class sizes, small variations in year-cohort size matter. Having 260 instead of 240 students might not be terribly noticeable, but 70 instead of 40 very much is.
So we can’t conclude anything about normal class size based on the Marauders’ year alone. Nor do I think we can rely on things like Harry’s impression of “two hundred” Quidditch spectators in Slytherin green: again, we have no reason to think he’s better than average at estimating crowd sizes, and anyway that crowd might include relatives or villagers. Ditto for the “hundred” thestral-drawn carriages.
Is there anything that might tilt the scales in favor of either the Marauders’ or Harry’s year being closer to “normal” for Hogwarts in their respective eras?
Yes, there is, at least for the 1990s: staff size.
We know there is only one teacher per required class. (Otherwise, Harry would have cursed not getting the other Potions teacher instead of Snape.) How many classes can one person teach during a school week?
Harry’s year is split into two sections. There are around 20 brooms for the combined Gryffindor/Slytherin flying lesson and around 20 earmuffs for the combined Gryffindor/Hufflepuff Herbology lesson (the smaller the number, the better the chance that Harry's estimate is reliable), which strongly suggests that Harry’s year has around 40 students (unless there are a lot more Ravenclaws that year). It’s possible that not every student from the given Houses is included in those sections, and that in fact Harry’s year is larger and split into more than two sections-except as we’ll see, it really isn’t.
Let’s assume that Years 1 through 5 are usually split into two sections, and NEWT students can all fit into one class. That means each teacher has twelve classes total. If they teach each class for three hours per week, that’s 36 hours. That’s a full-time job even before you add the prep, grading, remedial lessons, career advice sessions, patrolling for monsters… Plus, the school day seems to run from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., making 35 available teaching hours. So already we have to assume that the teachers are all using Time-Turners just to fit their classes in and have time for lunch. Okay, let’s arbitrarily assume that the lower years start at 8:00, making 40 available teaching hours. Now at least they get lunch breaks four out of five days per week…
This rules out year-cohorts being split into more than two classes as a regular occurrence. They just cannot fit that many classes into a day. Even one year out of seven having three class sections would be difficult. (At least we know why McGonagall was handing out class schedules after classes had started in HBP: constructing a schedule which lets every student attend all of their classes without conflicts must be a devil of a job. And see why she petitioned the Ministry for Hermione’s time-turner? The girl would have broken the schedule otherwise!)
So, how many students can they teach in one class?
If Harry’s year has 40 students, then teachers do not teach 40 students at once. Otherwise, they would teach Harry’s year in one group instead of making the schedule harder by splitting them.
Harry’s classes all seem to be around 20 students, except for that DADA lesson in OotP when he thinks there are 30 students watching his argument with Umbridge. After years of sitting in classes of 20, Harry can probably tell when there are more than 20 students in the room. Only Gryffindors are mentioned in that scene, so we don’t know which House or Houses they share the class with. If there are 10 Gryffindors and 17 Ravenclaws, maybe there are actually 27 students in the class, and Harry is rounding. (In this case, maybe the teachers could handle 40 students at once, but not 47.) Alternatively, maybe several students from Harry’s year have left Hogwarts by OotP (to home-school or move abroad, maybe because their parents are getting worried that there’s been a murderer or monster running amok every year for four straight years), and this is a class of 33 containing every remaining student in the year. If the latter, at least that would help with the scheduling.
We don’t know which scenario is true. Let’s split the difference and set the maximum number of students in a classroom as 35. That makes 70 about the highest number of students per year which the teachers could handle without massive Time-Turner abuse.
So if the Marauders’ year was over 70, either it was unusually large, or Hogwarts used to have two teachers per required subject and the number of students has been lower enough for long enough that they stopped needing those teachers several years ago. (By “needing,” I mean “is it physically possible to do without them,” not “does it provide the best education for the students and a humane schedule for the teachers.”) They would have to have lost the second set of teachers at least a few years ago; otherwise the retired/laid off/mysteriously vanished teachers would still be news when Harry started school. Students would be complaining that they miss Teacher X, who was so much better than McGonagall/Snape/Binns/etc.
But how likely is that? If the birthrate had fallen so sharply for so long, Ron wouldn’t be saying that wizards would have died out if they hadn’t married Muggles; he’d be saying that they will die out if they don’t all marry Muggles and have lots of babies as soon as humanly possible. Or if the birthrate is fine but half the students who would ordinarily go to Hogwarts had suddenly started homeschooling instead, you’d expect that drastic change to be news too. In Rita’s articles as evidence of Dumbledore’s failure as a headmaster, for example.
Furthermore, everyone speaks of having trouble filling “the” DADA position for the past 30 years. If Dumbledore had spent decades trying to fill two vacant positions, that ought to be notable enough to mention. And it would have been harder for everyone to miss that something odd was happening. We also have no evidence that Merrythought had a DADA-teaching colleague who was the first to fall victim to the curse when Voldemort didn’t get hired alongside them. Everything suggests that there has only been one DADA teacher since at least the 1940s. If the DADA Department had only one teacher while the others had two, this also would be notable enough for someone to mention over the course of six years, probably with the double workload as the reason they couldn’t keep a teacher for longer than a year. It seems more likely that there has only been one teacher per required subject for at least 40 years. (Other than the very, very brief overlap Rowling claims for McGonagall and Dumbledore as co-Transfiguration teachers in 1957 in that Pottermore essay. And let’s not start on the new McGonagall-timeline complications introduced by the FB movies).
Conclusions
Therefore, year-cohorts probably aren’t usually larger than 70, and might usually be smaller. Remember, classroom hours are only about half of a teacher’s total work hours. If they’re in the classroom for 36 hours per week, that makes for a 72-hour work week. I really can’t see Slughorn putting up with such a brutal schedule for decades on end no matter how much influence and candied pineapple he gets out of it, can you? Probably they usually have fewer students and so spend less time grading essays. And maybe they teach some classes for fewer than three hours per week. Maybe they only work, say, 54-hour weeks.
Under this scenario, the average year-cohort might be around 55, plus or minus 20 students in any given year. This would make the Marauders’ year unusually large. (Maybe the teachers being especially stretched is another reason they couldn’t handle the troublemakers.) It would put Harry’s year on the smaller side, but not shockingly so. If his year was always destined to be a bit smaller side through normal variation, a few parents dying or moving abroad or putting off having children would make a big difference. Say there would have been 47 students, and they got 40 instead. And maybe Ginny’s year and the one following got hit hardest, and have 34 or 35 students each.
This may not match whatever fuzzy idea Rowling had, but I think it fits what we actually see in the books. As much as anything can match the vague, inconsistent evidence, anyway.