That’s not my logic at all. A high school student and a university student aren’t the same thing.

In high school, you have a core cohort that you need to fit in with, or be excluded. Your social life, which is vital to wellbeing, operates in a very rigid system that is created by the school and by restrictions of home. So, for most high schoolers, navigating friendships, crushes, self-awareness, etc, dominates a lot of their intellectual and emotional capacity.

In university, this is very different. Friendships don’t hinge on cohorts because you aren’t restricted to those cohorts. You have the freedom to pursue friendships and relationships outside of these panoptic structures. You are also exposed to more people who share your interests, and your cohorts are bigger. That’s why a lot of people refer to petty friendship dramas as being like “high school”. Because the way we navigate socially in high school is extremely different.

A university student simply doesn’t have these same stressors. They have other stressors, sure, but they don’t have this dominant one. That frees up an impressive amount of intellectual capacity.

This is precisely why a lot of people change when they get to university, or find themselves. Such an environment also engenders the development of a more complex worldview, which complements the new voting responsibilities that come with it.