It's good to know I've mentioned the page change to someone I was talking to about this on Tumblr. Here in Ol' England, when I was still at Secondary school (a looong time ago! ) it was expected that at age 16/17, we either stayed on at 6th form school/college, do an apprenticeship, get a job, or go to University. None of this unemployed or 'take a year out to travel the world' malarky! Okay, so I chose an apprenticeship and got a good job out of it lol, but I loved that University was open to us with good grants from the government if we chose to go. I wanted to emulate that in my game, because it's just so odd to have teens still in 'high school' until they're young adults!

To be fair to EA, they didn't want to or couldn't create a new life stage. As far as the game is concerned, although we may see the subtle difference developmentally in our actives as they mature and learn skills, or even as they goof off and do nothing, there is no difference between a just aged up teen (13 years old?) and an older one. I might not have been so eager to run off to Uni myself if it had been full of middle/junior high school kids, that would have been more like summer camp only with better food. Or maybe boarding school.