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Inappropriately low expectations are as much, if not more of a problem than overly high expectations. In many disciplines, a PhD is useful only for an academic career, and most students go in hoping for such a career -- low expectations do these students a disservice.

Surely, there must be some within-country variation in school starting times? Seems like something that would vary between counties in the US or states in Germany

It's all the more frustrating because there increasingly are amazing field experiments testing classic social psychology experiments -- conducted by economists and political scientists.

The second author is, in fact, a member of the HiTOP consortium.