Guardian Colleges

The phenomenon of college athleticism, at least as it is known in the Esper Dimension, is relatively new in the Gate Dimension. "Football," for instance, is a relatively new sport. While other sports, certainly, are played and practiced in the Gatian universities (Gate has a reputation for producing schools of unparalleled fencers), most competitive team sports have only recently been introduced.

A few universities are pursuing these team sports with a sort of gusto, hoping to perhaps become good enough to compete in the Esper Dimension. What happens with these startup teams remains to be seen.

All Guardian universities are held to the highest educational standards; each is expected to perform exceptionally, faculty and administrators being penalized severely for falling below par. As a result, students can expect to be well-rounded where ever they are accepted within the Kingdom, allowing for the emphasises some schools give for certain subjects of course (most often in the sciences). All Guardian colleges are publically owned and operated; virtually no private schooling facilities exist on any level of the educational strata. For this reason, Guardian colleges are free for tax-paying residents of the Kingdom, with the exception of student housing (for which a student may apply for government loans, should he/she need them). Foreign residents are charged tuition as standard for most colleges elsewhere in the Web, and while government loans are not offered to foreigners, many private citizens do offer scholarships to non-nationals looking to receive a Guardian education (the Talman Institute is among the most well-known of the foundations established for this purpose; it survives despite the blemish on the family name earned by the OmniSent traitor, Ibanez Talman).