>Only other thing I can think of at the moment is that the translators
>made a major error. Those 4 are anything BUT JUNIOR high students. They're meant to be first-year senior high school students, i.e., in the 10th grade, which would mean they're either 15 or 16 depending on where in the year their birthdays fall. (In Japan, junior high is grades 7-9, senior high is 10-12, as opposed to {6|7}-8 / 9-12 split more typical here in the US.)
>I'd argue that they were what us californians would call junior
>COLLEGE students, but I'm not sure the whole junior (aka 2 years to an
>associate instead of a baccalaureate degree) college thing is a thing
>anywhere other than California?
Oh sure, two-year colleges exist outside California, though they're not always called junior colleges. Here in Maine, for instance, we have the Maine Community College System, which is a network of two-year schools that exists in parallel with, and separate from, the University of Maine System's four-year ones. There are also a few independent post-secondary schools in the state that offer two-year degrees, although I don't know off the top of my head of any that don't also have four-year programs.
I think a lot of two-year colleges around the country are rebranding away from the word "junior" as part of a general drive to be taken more seriously as an educational option, although Maine's state-run ones were never called that. When I was a kid, the state's network of two-year public colleges were called Vocational Technical Institutes (because all their courses were in technical things like radiography and the building trades), then they were Technical Colleges for a while, and lately they've settled on the "Community College" label.
There's that whole thing of whether they're positioned as trade schools or feeders to a university system, too. The MCCs shifted from one model to more-or-less both along with their rename; they still offer associate degrees in the trades, but they also have liberal-arts offerings that do lead to a two-year degree, but are really meant as a less expensive way to do the first two years of a BA.
(I can think of an example from Massachusetts as well—when I went to WPI, there was a two-year nursing school nearby called Becker Junior College, but they also started awarding four-year degrees and dropped the "Junior" in the early '90s.)
I actually took my physics courses at Eastern Maine Community College in Bangor when I was in the mechanical engineering technology program at UMaine; they were worth exactly equivalent transfer credit and cost about 10 percent as much, which was a nice thing for the lady who runs the School of Engineering Technology's admin office to clue me in on. :)
--G.
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