- If the students can be magically transported in at induction, why can't they be magically transported out at graduation? Why do the portals have to open on the far side of the graduation hall and not, say, in each student's dorm room?
- Possible answer 1: The balancing principle. The safer it is to get in, the more dangerous it is to get out, and given how much better seniors are at magic than freshmen, they get stuck with all the danger.
- Possible answer 2: The balancing principle. Mals can get through the gates with students if they are going the opposite direction the students are going, so it's okay if you come in through the residence halls where you're going to be hanging out for the next four years (you certainly don't mind if the mals take that opportunity to leave the Scholomance), you just have to go out through the isolated graduation hall, because that's when most of the mals come in and so that has to happen in the room full of mals.
- Dorm rooms in particular are temporary structures. The Scholomance destroys the old senior dorm every year and uses it as raw materials to form the new freshman dorm. It's possible that the induction/graduation spell requires permanent artifice to make it work (see the next answer). Alternatively, opening the gates in the senior dorm rooms might let mals come in and then cling to the raw materials, and thus be in the freshman dorm waiting for the incoming freshmen.
- Possible answer 3: When they built the Scholomance, they were expecting the gates to be more effective, so having to go out through the gates at all (or having the gates be 150 meters from the nearest stairway) wasn't a big deal. Fixing the induction spell to let students leave from their rooms would involve doing a lot of redesign work in the graduation hall, and thus would be as hard (or worse!) as fixing the cleansing machinery. The Asian enclaves were planning to build a new Scholomance, not bargaining for more seats in the existing one, and they were planning to fix this issue in their version.
- If graduation is in the morning, and induction is in the evening, and we make the reasonable assumption that enclave about-to-be-freshmen spend their last day outside the Scholomance talking to their older enclave mates about exactly what they can expect this year...why didn't the enclave freshmen tell everyone that the cleansing had worked? It's valuable information; surely some enclave graduate told their younger friend or relative to trade it to the new seniors.
- "There're records in the library of inducted students and graduated students. You've saved six hundred lives since you started school." Did Clarita only find records of students alive the morning before graduation, or are there records of who actually survived graduation that someone (Liesel?) could look up?
- If El's word in Book Three can be believed, getting out of the Scholomance is pretty traumatic an experience. Imagine being under incredibly lethal pressure for 4 years and then...getting out. Most Graduates probably take at least a day or so before they are able to be coherent again.
- How many enclaves are there?
- In a typical year the Scholomance has about 800 students make it to graduation, of which 40% (320) are enclavers or their allies. It's not clear what a typical enclaver alliance is like—in Orion's year, among El's friends, it tends to be one enclaver and four allies, but that's probably inflated by the fact that Orion's year has more survivors (and El's friends aren't enclavers). So there are anywhere from 60 to a few hundred enclavers per year.
- We're told that about 400 students out of the 1600 students in the class can expect to survive. The enclaver survival rate is about 80%. That means the indie survival rate must be lower. If a fifth of the indie kids survive, then about 130 enclavers enter the school each year and about 106 of them graduate. If a sixth of the indie kids survive, it's 210 enclavers entering and 162 leaving. El mentions a one-in-seven survival rate outside being preferable to a one-in-four survival rate inside, so if the survival rate's less than one in twelve (372 enclavers entering, 298 graduating), none of the indie kids would come. note
- Lots of enclaves, especially in Asia, have only emerged in the last few decades, so before then, there may have been a higher indie survival rate.
- It's generally implied that most enclaves have several students per year (New York and Shanghai in El's year each have nine; Argentina has four; El assumes that Sudarat has several older enclave mates to ask for help). Even based on the Argentina number, that's well under a hundred enclaves.
- Conversely, we hear of:
- 10 enclaves in the United States and Canada (Atlanta, Austin, Maui, New Orleans, New York, Oakland, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Seattle, Toronto)
- 13 enclaves in Europe (Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, Edinburg, Lisbon, London, Manchester, Milan, Munich, Paris, Pisa, St. Petersburg, Vienna)
- 11 enclaves in Asia (Bangkok, Beijing, Dubai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Jaipur, Kolkata, Kyoto, Lapu-Lapu, Mumbai, Shanghai) plus at least one in Pakistan and others in Japan and China;
- One in South America (Salta), one in Australia (Sydney), three in Africa (Johannesburg, Lagos, Zanzibar).
- That's thirty-nine...and given how concentrated in Europe and North America that list is, clearly there are more.
- El mentions enclave wars as being destructive and not unheard of, so some continents may have once had lots of enclaves but now are down to a few because of said wars.
- For that matter, how does El get all these survival rate numbers?
- Probably from the Scholomance. It's able to monitor everything that happens in it, so tallying up all of the deaths and publishing that information shouldn't be too much trouble for it.
- Since big maw-mouths regularly eat small ones, do the small ones die when they are first swallowed or when the bigger maw-mouths get eaten? Neither scenario seems to make sense. There is no mention of dozens of enclaves linked to maw-mouths being destroyed after the dead souls of both the maw-mouths and their human victims are put to rest in The Golden Enclaves. And if they die when they are first swallowed, then lots of enclaves would be destroyed without warning, but El says it is almost unheard of for one to be destroyed as suddenly as Bangkok was.
- The Golden Enclave spell in The Golden Enclaves replaced the Scholomance's mawmouth-based foundation with a golden foundation. The explanation that could work is that they replaced a bunch of enclave foundations at the same time—every enclave whose mawmouth Patience/Fortitude had eaten.
- El remarks in the epilogue that they'd probably drained the mana reserves of forty enclaves in replacing the "stolen power" under the Scholomance and other enclaves, and there's another comment about Orion holding the Scholomance and "a dozen other enclaves" all up like Atlas now, so it does seem like the spell replaced all those foundations at the same time. This does raise the question of what happens when Orion dies, though.
- Which (if any) enclaves in the series could be natural enclaves that formed without the usual Human Sacrifice ritual and never did sacrifices anyway to expand like Beijing did?
- El says it takes ten generations or so for natural enclaves to form. Even for normal humans, that's a timespan of centuries rather than decades, and wizards live a long time. Natural enclaves also require permanent settlements with a high enough population density for enough wizards to find each other and form a community. So first you probably need a city of a reasonable size, which in pre-modern times means it's probably been existing stably for a couple hundred years at least, and then it has to stay at least stable enough for the next few hundred for one group of people to not just live there, but continuously occupy a specific area within it. The Far East and the Indian subcontinent are probably the best candidates, since the civilisations there have tended to balance longevity and stability pretty well; hence one of the few natural enclaves in the world being in Beijing. Most other places in the world don't have large enough cities that have endured long enough stretches without major disruptions.
- I very likely missed this part, but to ask. I understand that the Scholomance is horrible for the people inside it, but it offers better protection from mals that younger magic users would get if they were outside it and so it's grudgingly accepted as the best solution, even with the mals that are inside. But the school itself has no teachers, yet the kids learn multiple skills, spells, etc. But for what? Are the kids still targets when they leave?
- A lot of what the kids are learning is meant to help them just survive school, and then get through graduation. But they will still need skills they can use in the outside world if they survive, and indie kids are also trying to get into enclaves by impressing the enclavers.
- I remember one sentence where El mentions that the school will punish people for not putting the work in, but if the Scholomance is trying to protect as many kids as it can, is there another reason? Does it work in triage? Sorry Billy, you flunked Sanskrit and now you'll spend eternity having your soul digested.
- The school's driving principle is nakedly consequentialist, about as pure an expression of "the ends justify the means" that you could find. I think El says at one point that the school doesn't bother trying to protect the students it thinks won't survive so it can focus its limited resources on the ones that will make it out, and will even sacrifice a weaker link - if one student's death prevents two others, that's what it will do. It's also noted that the students generate at least part of the mana/malia that the school runs on, and both hard work and terror generate more. Kids who can't hack the schoolwork are probably not going to make it to graduation anyway, so the Scholomance might as well scare the crap out of them for their energy before they die while motivating the others to work their asses off.
- Bear in mind also that the Scholomance was designed by a bunch of upper-class Victorian dudes whose ideas about education probably included a belief that the threat of severe punishment is an excellent way to get children to learn.
- Even the Scholomance's 1 in 4 survival rate would require an average of more than 8 children per woman to keep the population level, let alone the pre-Scholomance casualty rates. Are wizards careening towards extinction?
- El says that the wizard population has been growing since the founding of the Scholomance. So yes, apparently wizards are having lots and lots of babies. Liu's grandmother, for example, is noted as having started late and having a wide spacing between her children, resulting in her "only" having six. Wizards do have life-extension magic (Liu's grandmother had her last baby in her sixties), so this isn't as implausible as it would be for mundanes.
- Remember how much the enclavers benefit from having lots of independent wizards around. I have a guess (not confirmed in canon) that the enclavers are deliberately trying to keep the independent birth rate up, and so are selling at a discount rate all longevity magic that has enhanced fertility as a side effect.
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