Best years of her life?

Going to university has become a modern-day rite of passage, writes Zahra Akkerhuys. The chance for young adults to meet hundreds of like-minded individuals, work hard and play hard in a world removed from the stresses of working for a living.

But child prodigies such as the missing 15-year-old St Hilda's student Sufiah Yusof and Ruth Lawrence, who graduated from Oxford University in 1986, have a totally different experience of life at university. Indeed, Yusof's experience is as much tied up in an environment of bitterness and anger as the world of academia. In an emotional e-mail sent to her parents yesterday, she vowed never to return home after alleging she'd put up with "15 years of physical and emotional abuse."

Yusof and Lawrence's genius inevitably segregates them from their peers and often their siblings and they become more at ease in the company of adults than with other children.

Yet when these gifted children are admitted to institutions such as Oxford University they are suddenly plunged into a world many feel they are not ready for.

Their young age inevitably isolates them from their fellow students, and communication with them is difficult. Many fellow students who have studied with young prodigies have talked of their academic brilliance but also their startling isolation a lack of understanding of social situations and a poor grip on communication skills. Even university officials concede that there can be problems. A spokeswoman says: "There is no question that these children are intellectually ready for their courses but there is a great gap in the maturity of a 13-year-old and an 18-year-old.

"They are children in an adult environment. It is hard to understand exactly how they respond to it.

"In centuries gone by children in their early teens were admitted but that procedure changed as the education system evolved in this country."

Despite their intellectual prowess they are still children and their parents, whose driving ambition is usually responsible for the fact the child is at university in the first place, end up shadowing their every move giving them little opportunity to grow in a normal way.

The atmosphere can end up becoming stifling as the youngsters witness those around them enjoying the freedom that they know they will never have.

Could this have contributed to Sufiah Yusof's disappearance?

Professor David Robertson, dean of St Hugh's, the Oxford college from which Ruth Lawrence graduated, has spoken out about admitting youngsters at an early age. He believes that in the long run it could do more harm than good.

He says: "Given the enormous range of problems ordinary undergraduates struggle through, not always without permanent harm in the high-pressure environment of a top university, it would be improbable if the 'prodigies' didn't suffer, invisibly and fairly horribly.

"In practice, child prodigies can only get through universities by effectively not being there.

"They do not experience undergraduate life: having been cheated of the joys as well as the tribulations of the later school years, they go on to skip another formative experience. They jump from a probably rather restricted childhood to a technically superbly trained young adulthood. And that is the problem."

The child prodigies who have studied at Oxford University have invariably chosen maths or science-based courses underlining the idea that a certain degree of life experience is required to study arts-based courses.

The principal of Harris Manchester College, which only admits mature students, Dr Ralph Waller, says: "We deal with older students and feel that if you are studying subjects such as English, History or Theology it's helpful to bring an experience of life to it. "In some respects it's true to say the older the better. It is only very occasionally that you get a young student who is quite brilliant at an arts subject at a very early age."