Expanding on Jimmy Sawczuk's solution - what if you also needed to process feedback data into a form page where a previous selection needed to be loaded/selected.
A variable holding the user's previous selection can be used in an if statement to dynamically assign the "Selected" attribute like so:
for (i = new Date().getFullYear(); i > 1900; i--)
{
if(userselection == i){
$('#yearpicker').append($('').val(i).attr("selected","selected").html(i));
} else {
$('#yearpicker').append($('').val(i).html(i));
}
}