I've found myself with a pile-up of students when I am suffering from a dearth of labour. My system is very slow and I've run out of patience trying to figure out how long it take for a student to become an adult. Does anyone have the figure?
My solution to labour dearth is to take the whack on skills and fire the teacher(s), which causes the students to become labourers, but uneducated. Of course the first thing to do is re-establish the schools. This whole thing can be expensive with respect to skilled labour not getting trained, even if one gets a flood of unskilled labour. In my current township I have five schools and so can accommodate up to 100 students. I have more than five settlements.
Students will graduate at 15 y/o, if they live near the school.
......but it might even take until 25 if they live very far away.
In the city I'm building for the 100-challenge, all of the females graduated at 16 years. (15 year graduation may be possible, but a couple of the houses were as close to the school as possible.) I didn't pay as much attention to the males, but I saw one who moved (as a student) into new housing some distance from its school and graduated at 19 years.
Unless the settlements are quite close together, I recommend having a school for each settlement, positioned not too far from any of the settlement's houses.
Thanks all. So travel time remains important (I should have known). My schools are scattered and are mostly near my markets which are in the centre of each settlement.
So now, my main problem with this program is that wine doesn't like the threading model and changes it. The result is that the whole thing crawls even at 10x.
Have to agree with
@Nilla and
@irrelevant. If you were watching the recent Flowerchild Commune Challenge, this is the reason for the 'closing of schools/relocation of students/reopening of schools' cycle that many were doing. It was to try to keep students assigned to the school closest to their home to get them through the curriculum faster so they could go do grunt work sooner.
I once had a citizen who was still living at home and going to school at 23. His happiness was 1/2 a star. Seriously.
My experience is the same as others: Distance is the key. I've noticed that students who pair up and move to a house further away from their school (they don't change when they move unless you manipulate the school staffing) then take longer to graduate while students who move closer get done much sooner.
This is not the only area where travel delays make a serious difference. If you have the stone, stone roads do help.