Universities

Students

Anyone that's 16 years or older can sign up for a class for which they can afford to pay the tuition. The tuition is a fee paid at once when registering for the class. The price of tuition may vary from university to university, and some universities may even offer free education or reduced fees for permanent residents of the city the university is located in. After the tuition has been paid, the student is free to come and go indefinitely until he decides to either take another class or go to another university.

When signing up for a class, the student should consider the maximum skill level offered in the class as well as the quality of the university. Students should try to avoid poorly maintained universities as their pace of learning will be much slower, and in some cases, might even prevent the student from reaching the skill level promised by the university.

“Attend Classes” must be selected as your career mission in order for you to successfully attend a class. Remaining on campus while attending class isn't required although it will help speed up the learning process.

If the student has no previous knowledge of the skill he's studying, it may take a couple of classes before the student grasps the basics of the skill and it shows up on his character page. If a student wants to speed things up and skip this process, he could read a book on the subject first to get a head start. Skill books can be found in most bookstores.

Diary events guide the student throughout the entire education process, telling him everything he needs to know about the quality and availability of the teachers and the university.

Special Rules for Students: No specific professor is required to be on campus for a student with less than five stars in a skill to get successful learning updates. However, when this does occur, the speed of learning is reduced.

Professors

The professor is employed by the university to ensure that the quality of education remains high and to provide the skills necessary for teaching different classes. Being a professor is a full time job and can’t be combined with other jobs such as being a CEO. Please look up the rules on employment for more information about what it takes to work as a professor.

A professor puts all his skills at the disposal of the university to teach to its students. The professor never has to select which skill he wishes to teach; instead, this is decided automatically whenever a student attends class.

While working on campus, the lecturer, in addition to teaching his/her skills to students, also gets to study, research, and experiment with other skills he/she's interested in. Universities won't allow lecturers to focus their attention on skills they have less than 3 stars in, though. Allowing them to do so would be disastrous for their image as respectful educational institutions…

To receive successful professor updates, a professor must choose the career mission “Go to work” and remain on campus. In addition, the professor must also select the skill to be focused upon. These settings are found in the regular character skill selection page.

Professors improve their skills more quickly if they focus their work upon a skill taught in a class offered at the university. If the professor focuses his work upon a skill the university doesn't teach, his learning progress will be a lot slower. The skill a professor decides to focus his personal attention on doesn't determine the skill he teaches the students; that skill is determined automatically by the system each time a student goes to class.

The quality of the university affects the learning ability of professors as well.

Special Rules for Professors: A professor is not required to have his career mission set on work in order to teach a class to students. His presence on campus is enough for the students to get what they need.

Running a University

Universities can either be privately operated or government controlled depending on what the local politicians decide. To manage a university, you must either be the president of the company that owns the university or employed as the university CEO.

In order for the university to offer any classes, it must first hire professors. Employing enough appropriately skilled professors and making sure they stay on campus to do their job is essential to running a successful university.

Each university can host up to a maximum of 30 classes, but only as many classes as it has professors. This means that if a university has 10 professors, it can offer up to 10 different classes. Existing classes will never be closed because of a lack of professors, but the university won't be able to add any more classes to its curriculum until a sufficient number of professors are hired.

Universities can offer classes in skills which they have lecturers with skill levels of 3 or more stars. The skill level of the lecturers determines how many stars a student can get while studying at the university. This means that a student can never become better in a skill than the lecturers on campus.

Should the university lose its ability to teach a class with students in it, the students will be notified of this occurence when trying to go to class. New students won't be able to sign up for that class until a new professor with the necessary skills has been hired.

Tuition

The price of registering for each class is up to the university to set. Prices are set both for permanent residents of the university city and for visitors from out of town.

School Supplies

Both students and professors require school supplies to do their work properly. School supplies are paid for by the university whenever a student attends class or a professor goes to work. The cost of school supplies is based on the quality of the university. Running a high quality university with hundreds of students can therefore be a truly expensive undertaking. Should the university run out of cash, it will no longer be able to function as a learning institution.

Personal Notes

While pursuing their goals at universities, both students and professors alike might be struck by sudden insight about what they're studying. When this happens, the affected character will write a brief personal note about this new revelation. A personal note should be read again as soon as possible by the character who wrote it. The sooner a note is read, the more it boosts the skill the character is currently improving.