Scouts get around

Hmm, so I was reading a post on uk.rec.scouting where a leader or 2 mentioned that scouts had been elected to this youth parliament thing. And started wondering if the figures do imply that scouts seem to be more involved in “Success”

Last year the Scout Association reported 358,475 youth members (not including as youth members those leaders who are also counted as Network due to being under 25)

I couldn’t find up-to-date numbers for the population of the UK, but i found some figures for 2000 which gave 14,792,000 people aged 5 to 25. I guess population rises in time? or maybe does not change too much?

This gives 2.5% of the population being scouts.

But then i suppose many people are not members for the full time… Helpfully, we could compare figures for scouts (99,403) with those 10-14 (3,848,900) and thus again 2.5% are members. (proportionally membership is highest in the 8-10 age bracket.)

So why do a disproportionally high number of people that I meet doing stuff, and/or making something of themselves seem to be/have been scouts?

I wonder if scouts is having an effect on people, or if the membership of scouting is effectively self selecting to a certain type of person.

As an aside I can think of people who were involved in stuff at uni who had not been scouts. but were members of other organisations instead….