deathtocapslock | How Many Wizards and Witches are There?

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How Many Wizards and Witches are There?

I've been playing around some more with numbers to try to estimate the percentage of muggle-borns in the wizarding world, and one of the problems I've run into is that I can't decide how many wizards and witches there are overall. I've read two excellent essays on the matter by Jodel and Whitehound. Jodel estimates that there are between 3600 and 4800 wizards and witches, depending on the average lifespan, which she guesses is between 90 and 120. Whitehound argues that there are closer 10,000 wizards and witches altogether in the British Isles.

The problem is that Rowling gives us totally arbitrary and inconsistent numbers, even within canon. In an early interview, she said that there were 1000 students at Hogwarts, which would be about 143 students in each class. In a later interview, she reduced that number to 600 students, or about 86 in each year.

In the early books, there is evidence that there are about 40 students in Harry's year. There are 20 broomsticks for the combined Gryffindor/Slytherin fyling lessons and 20 pairs of earmuffs for the combined Gryffindor/Hufflepuff Herbology lessons on mandrakes. And, indeed, Rowling has said that she created 40 characters to be in Harry's class. 40 students per year would add up to 280 students altogether at Hogwarts. If the average wizarding lifespan of is about 100 years, then this would mean the total wizarding population is about 4000.

In yet another interview, Rowling said that the total wizarding population is about 3000. If the average lifespan is about 100 years, then this would mean there are 30 students per year at Hogwarts, adding up to a total student body of 210. This doesn't line up with the evidence in the earlier books of 40 students in Harry's class. However, by OOTP, 9 or 10 students seem to have "disappeared" from canon, suggesting that she maybe changed her mind and that the numbers of 20 broomsticks and 20 earmuffs are "inaccurate". As I said in my previous post, only 30 students from Rowling's class list are ever mentioned in the books. Moreover, in chapter 12 of OOTP, we read:

'It was murder,' said Harry. He could feel himself shaking. He had hardly spoken to anyone about this, least of all thirty eagerly listening classmates.

30 students plus Harry is too many for a combined Gryffindor/Hufflepuff or Gryffindor/Slytherin class, and it would be strange for a class to have three of the houses, but not four. So, either it's a combined Gryffindor/Ravenclaw class, and Ravenclaw has at least 21 students (16 of whom are never named in the books), or it's a class with all four houses, and 9 students are "missing" from the class.

Based on how Hogwarts operates, a total student body of 210 or 280 students makes much more sense than the 600 or 1000 figures that Rowling has suggested in interviews. There's only one professor in each subject to teach all of those students. When I was in high school, my teachers taught 120-150 students each, so even the lowest figure of 210 is rather unrealistic.

However, Whitehound argues that a total wizarding population of 3000 (or even 4000) does not make much sense when we look at overall wizarding society. It seems far too low. There are too many employees at the Ministry of Magic, too many shops in Diagon Alley, too many wards in St. Mungo's Hospital, etc. for there to only be 3000 wizards and witches in Britain. There were also far too many attendees at the World Cup for a wizarding population that small. In the real world, in 1994, there were a total of 61.5 million people in the British Isles, about 1.1% of the 5.6 billion in the whole world (Whitehound uses slightly different numbers). This means there would only be 272,727 wizards and witches in the world if there were 3000 in the British Isles. It seems unrealistic that 36% of the wizards and witches in the entire world would be at the World Cup. This is why Whitehound suggests that the population of Wizarding Britain is at least 10,000. (Read the second half of her essay for more a more detailed discussion). However, if this were the case, there would be about 100 students in each year of Hogwarts, if the average lifespan is 100 years.

So, how do we reconcile these various numbers? Which numbers do we use to determine the size of the population, and which numbers do we ignore? How many wizards and witches are there?

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>>>>*Is* the average lifespan a 100 years?

Yes, well, this is of course another way in which she has been inconsistent. But a shorter lifespan would mean an even smaller population... or a larger student body.

>>>>We might also be mislead by the numbers in Harry's class, as Harry is of the generation that was born at the hight of VoldieWar I. One or two classes below him might have *double* the amount of kids as they would've been the result of a end-of-war babyboom.

I think it makes sense that Harry's class is a bit smaller than average. In the real world UK, though, birth cohorts haven't usually been more than 25% smaller than average during war years. So, if Harry's class has 30 students, then an average class size would be 40 students.... Or 53.3 students if Harry's class has 40.

>>>>It has been a longstanding theory of mine that the HP series' huge fanbase is largely due to the fact that it has SO MANY gaps, such weak and inconsistent characters, that people tend to fill in the gaps with their own projections, based on their own experiences, and are so more emotionally invested in the stories than in other, better excecuted, ones.

I've had similar suspicions for a while. But it's a bit ironic that it makes the HP story more popular than stories that are well written.

"And as for that lumbering Ministry...! Okay, okay JKR, we get it! All Tory government is Evil and we should all rally behind New Labour. Yes, yes, but could we all please forgo with the sloppy 1984 imagery?"

I'm sure that JKR would agree with those sentiments, although I'm afraid I don't really see them in the books. The government in Harry Potter is pretty much always depicted as corrupt and incompetent, and whenever it tries to increase its control over Hogwarts it's portrayed as unwanted and unwelcome, which would seem a rather strage thing for a Labour supporter to write. Although I suppose on the other hand Hermione's certainly got all the self-righteousness of some of the worst left-wing journalists (Polly Toynbee, anyone?), and the way the Slytherins are portrayed is a lot like the way the Tories are portrayed in the Guardian (rich? Check. Got their money through unspecified but probably slightly dubious means? Check. Snobbish? Check. Racist? Check. Always looking out for themselves at the expense of wider society? Check), so... Basically, trying to find a coherent political message in Harry Potter is a lot like trying to find a coherent storyline in My Immortal: difficult, dispiriting and quite probably impossible.

"It has been a longstanding theory of mine that the HP series' huge fanbase is largely due to the fact that it has SO MANY gaps, such weak and inconsistent characters, that people tend to fill in the gaps with their own projections, based on their own experiences, and are so more emotionally invested in the stories than in other, better excecuted, ones."

That makes rather a lot of sense, even if I do find it a bit dispiriting.

I don't really know much about UK politics. But my sense is that the political values in HP are fairly libertarian.

Oh yes. Which would put them closer to the Tories than Labour (at least, in theory). Not that this comes as a suprise from JK "Lip service counts as being left-wing" Rowling.

Remember also the over 100 students taking DADA OWL with Severus in OOTP. This supports there being fluctuating cohort sizes.

Very true, though it's possible that the exam had both OWL and NEWT students in the same room. Even so, that would still mean that Severus's year had 50 or 60 students.

Since it seems only those who got E or better on OWLs proceeded to NEWTs, and in Harry's year of 40 25 or 26 took DADA for NEWT-level, I think the over 100 students were more like 70-80 OWL students and 40-50 NEWT students, if both took exams together. But didn't the board say it was the OWL exam? (or was it Severus' paper? that would make a difference.)

It was Severus's paper.

What if we said that the average class size is 60 students, but that it can vary by as much as 20 students, or 33%, in any given year?

Cohort size in a small population will fluctuate more than in a large one. Up to anyone to come up with boundaries of the fluctuation.

Sigh, I really have no idea. I feel like the major limiting factor in all of this is the number of teachers at Hogwarts. I get the impression that there really is, and only ever has been, one teacher per subject.

What is the largest number of students you imagine being supervised by a teacher in class? Double that and get the maximum cohort size.

Well, the lessons mostly seem to consist of the teacher giving instructions and the pupils carrying them out, in which case classes could conceivably be rather large, more like university lectures than school classrooms. I think a bigger limitation would be the amount of homework they could mark (unless they've all got time-turners, which I doubt, they'd struggle to mark it all if there were too many pupils, although not knowing what it's like to be a teacher I really couldn't say how much they could realistically mark keep on top of) and to a lesser degree the difficulty of keeping discipline with a high pupil:teacher ratio.

Well, here in the U.S., high school classes don't get much larger than 35 students, but they can be as large as 50 or 60 students in some Asian countries.

In addition to what for_diddled said, I think safety would be a major concern, most especially in Potions. How many students can one teacher safely supervise when they're regularly engaging in activities that can get themselves or each other seriously injured or killed?

How about the average class is 70 students per year, with as many as 100 and as few as 40 in any given year, plus, say, another 2 students per year who go abroad or are home-schooled? That gives us a total population of 7200.

I understand this as there are the homeschooled children with them, too. Maybe they can be taught at home, but still have to sit OWLs (and then NEWTs, perhaps, or then they can start study for NEWTs at Hogwarts)?

how many homeschool children are you guessing there are?

No idea. If it is DADA OWL + NEWT, then perhaps roughly 1/3 NEWT, 1/6 homeschool children OWL, 1/2 Hogwarts schooled OWL?
How many children use to be homeschooled in Britain?

OK, so that would mean that roughly 25% of magical children are homeschooled. If there were 40 students in Harry's year, then there would be 13 or 14 additional students who were homeschooled.

Or, in Severus's year, there may have been 60 students who attended Hogwarts and an additional twenty who were homeschooled.

I have no idea if that's reasonable or not. Just doing some Googling, it looks like it's been pretty standard to send middle and upper class children to school for several centuries in Britain, well before Seclusion took effect. It was mostly just the nobility who were tutored at home. So I don't get the sense that homeschooling has been a significant part of British culture. But it's possible that it's different in the wizarding world.

And the "hundreds" of people in the Slytherin section of the stands in that Quidditch game in... PS/SS, was it?

I also wonder whether wizards actually did have fewer children during the war followed by a baby boom, on second thought. Wizards who fought didn't have to go away to the front, because there was no front; they could stay home and bungle their contraceptive potions. The Weasleys had most of their children during the war years. Molly said a lot of people got married suddenly during the first war - which is not evidence that they reproduced at that time, but it does open the possibility. In the second war, we have Tonks and Lupin and Baby Teddy, so the Weasleys aren't totally unique in this. Do wizards just go on having kids as usual during wars? Although if enough adult wizards who otherwise would have had more children died, that could still lead to a lower number of children in that cohort. Gah, I have no idea how this fits together.

This is a very good point. But the "war years" do provide a convenient explanation for why Harry's class might be so much smaller than normal.

While the "war years" lasted more than a decade, most of the war actually only happened in the last two years or so, during which Harry was born.

Well, it makes sense at first glance. But I think we are getting distracted by the word 'war' here. What took place from all the clues we get was not a war in the sense that we know it, even one on home turf, where a significant fraction of the population (mostly from the same one or two overlapping generations) was engaged day in day out in fighting instead of family making. What we have is two independent militant groups of a few dozen people each - drawn mainly from a handful of related families - fighting each other and occasionally causing the death or disappearance of a few public figures, while carrying on their domestic lives relatively as normal. A gang war crossed with political terrorism, very different scale and circumstances from the sort of war that has a significant impact upon birth rates for the entire population. (Plus, many of the families involved are precisely those whose children attend school with Harry, so the drop wasn't caused simply by lack of births among fighting families.)

Nor would theorized effects of the war upon the Muggleborn population account for the impact you postulate. For one, we see no sign at all that Voldemort in VoldWar I ever succeeded in concretely disenfranchising or killing a significant number of Muggleborns - there are no wandless and homeless mentioned, no impact registered upon the society of such a thing. Secondly, the *highest* percentage of the population possible according to JKR's worldbuilding being Muggleborn is %25, and it seems rather too high still to me. So even if he had succeeded to some degree before Halloween, in order to impact the birth rate enough to create that sort of drop, he would have had to it seems to me effectively wipe out, or otherwise prevent from reproducing, most of the Muggleborn population. No sign of that, nor evidence he was ever in a position of power long enough to have managed it.

Yes, you're quite correct, but that leaves us with the problem that, if 40 students per year is normal, then there aren't enough people to account for the wizarding society we see outside of Hogwarts.

There would be a fair amount of fluctuation in class sizes from year to year that just naturally occurs in a population this small, but I'm not sure how large a fluctuation is reasonable.

There would very likely be a smaller percentage of muggle-borns in Harry's year than in the 1970's due to the fact that there was a baby boom in the UK in the 1960's. If there were four muggle-born in Harry's year, there would have been 5 or 6 muggle-born first years in 1975. But that's not enough of a difference to affect the overall class size all that much

Maybe there's some other factor - a magical STI that can cause sterility or something. And there was an outbreak which conveniently hit the would-be parents of Harry's classmates at a crucial time. Yeah. At least they wouldn't be likely to talk about it, so it wouldn't be odd for Harry not to know.

oooh, maybe the sharp drop in births due to a magical STI started in, say, 1970, right around the time that Voldemort started becoming more popular. Young adults were restless and joined "causes" instead of being able to pour their energy into starting their families, which most witches and wizards did in their early 20's.

Since most wizards don't understand biology well, it was easy to blame the drop in births on muggle-borns. The muggle-borns were "stealing magic" from the "missing" children in the wizarding world.

Yeah.... in any case, a magical STI like that would probably impact a whole generation, not just one or two years.

If there are only 280-ish students at Hogwarts right now instead of the usual 600 or 1000 or whatever it's supposed to be, maybe it did? That would be something noticeable enough that Umbridge could use it to back up her "stealing magic" story (not logically, but they're wizards...), but Harry probably wouldn't notice unless it hit him over the head. Or I suppose the St. Mungo's healers could have figured out a cure that worked while the disease was the early stages after a couple of years - too late to reverse the damage for the ones who'd had it for a while, but at least they could stop it from spreading any more.

We don't know, though, that there are only 280 students at Hogwarts right now. All we know is that there are, at most, 40 students in Harry's class. There could very well be 60 or 70 students in the class above him.

The eternal Hogwarts problem... I just have trouble seeing how one teacher per subject could handle that many students, unless they all have time-turners (and use them to get some extra sleep as well as getting extra time to work). But as far as we know that's all they've ever had. You would think a former teacher would know better!

Yes exactly! I just keep going around in circles with this one.

Also, if it's magic syphilis, that would explain why so many wizards act like their brains have been swizzled...

Oh dear, maths.

Is it ever outright stated in canon that all magical children go to Hogwarts? The likes of Stan and Ern, and the myriad traders and other dodgy sorts, would suggest that many do not. It's probably fee-paying (either Harry's parents pre-paid, or he got free entry for saving the world) and the weasleys can only just afford it. In any case, it's futile arguing about a world whose creator put so little thought into.

Yes, oh dear maths, indeed. ::headdesk::

In chapter 12 of DH, Remus says:

Attendance is now compulsory for every young witch and wizard. That was announced yesterday. It’s a change, because it was never obligatory before. Of course, nearly every witch and wizard in Britain has been educated at Hogwarts, but their parents had the right to teach them at home or send them abroad if they preferred.

So there is definitely the possibility that some children are home-schooled or attend a school in another country, like Durmstrang. I have no idea how to estimate how many of those children there would be.

But others who have given this a lot more thought than I have concluded that Hogwarts is probably the only magical school in Britain and that it isn't a fee-paying school. Whitehound has a very good explanation here (http://members.madasafish.com/~cj_whitehound/Fanfic/Britrefs.htm#Hogwarts)

Rowling has flat-out *told* us that Hogwarts is the only magical school in Great Britain. Repeatedly. Usually in response to questions as to whether there is any sort of primary schooling for magical children, or any sort of university.

But then Hogwarts is hardly a proper *school*. There are no real "academics" taught there, apart from History of Magic. It is a magical vocational school, and is completely occupied in the basic training of magical skills.

Small wonder that most wizards are so bloody ignorant. A bit more mystifyling that so much of the student body is determined to blow off the only training that they are ever likely to get.

Rowling has flat-out *told* us that Hogwarts is the only magical school in Great Britain. Repeatedly.

Sure, but not in the actual *books*, unless I'm forgetting something.

My thought is that there actually are other British magical schools, they're just less prestigious. Not necessarily worse at, you know, teaching. But less prestigious.

I suppose that would make it odd that Muggleborns automatically go to Hogwarts, but perhaps Hogwarts is just the only one doing outreach, and the other schools don't do any recruiting. Anyway... no, it isn't canon, but it isn't denied by canon. It's also more interesting than canon, which means it can't actually be true of the Potterverse. ;)

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How Many Wizards and Witches are There?

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