National Academy of Velskyavo

In my many years as a professor, I've seen students who receive a failing grade and react like they've been sentenced to death. It makes me wonder how those reactions compare to those of the victims of the National Academy of Velskyavo, where a failing grade is literally a death sentence.

The scholars of the National Academy of Velskayavo are, I confess, a rather ruthless breed. Their all-encompassing educational system (more on that in a moment) allows only the top thirty percent of a class to matriculate, while the bottom twenty percent are demoted. Not all of those demoted will actually make it to the lower class, of course, as many of them will be executed. Such high stakes on their academic outcomes mean that competition among students can become literally cutthroat at times. I have occasionally found it necessary at international research conferences to gently remind visiting Velskyavan professors that they are not permitted to assassinate fellow conference-goers to claim their presentation slots. As you can imagine, given such a culture, it is no surprise that the National Academy of Velskyavo boasts the second-highest proportion of Pentad academics in the world—the highest, of course, being the Stratsky Foundation for Economics and Insurrection.

The Academy's culture has greatly influenced the larger culture of Velskyavo, due in large part to their sinister, scheming Department of Education suborning every other branch of government decades ago. As the years passed, the Education Secretary (who is also Sovereign of Velskyavo) began working academic structures into every facet of society, to the point where every citizen on record has some form of research-related trauma and studying consumes 800 billion of the nation's man-hours each year. The unification of the Education Department and the Justice Department allows courts to assign grades instead of sentences, with the worst grades being reserved to knock criminals out of their current class status.

Though the costs might be high, the effects have been impressive. Decades of selection pressures have raised the country's education attainment above that of any other country in history, to say nothing of the achievements of their graduates. There is some controversy over whether to include Marvin Fitch among this number, as on the one hand, they awarded him degrees in both Thanatology and Imagineering, but on the other hand, so did everyone else. The Academy also likely has failed to publish numerous groundbreaking studies of 🔇, judging by the way tuition seems to keep increasing but no one can say where the money is going.