system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Discworld] Who are the students of Unseen University?

We learn a lot about the staff, from the teachers to even the cooks, sweepers and candledrippers, but the students are always sort of in the background. We know they exist, but we rarely hear anything about them or what they do. For example: what age are they? Is UU a real "university", where you'd expect people in their late teens to mid-20s to be students? Or is it a Hogwarts situation, with kids being trained from an early age? What do the students do before being admitted? Given that DW is a feudal late-middle-ages fantasy setting, we can't presuppose everyone to have gotten basic schooling as they would before entering Hogwarts or a university. Do the students just live as farmers or apprentice blacksmiths or whatever, and then enter UU without basic literacy? Or does UU accept only students who learned the prerequisite skills elsewhere?

How does one get admitted to UU? Does one apply? What's the criterion for admission? Or do students get identified and invited? What's the criterion for invitation? I know (from *Sourcery*) that there is innate magical ability that is unevenly distributed among people, but is that all that counts? Would UU accept a dullwit with a high magic skill, or does it admitt more on the basis of abilities that actually let you learn spells and theory, even if your magic skill isn't exceptional? Do they have to pay tuition? Are there scholarships?

Finally, what happens to graduates? They don't all graduate to become staff members (I think only Stibbons does over the course of the novels), so what happens to the rest? Do they go and open a practice somewhere as hedgewitches and -wizards? Are there other institutions that employ them?

I know there's probably not a lot of detail about any of this in the books, but feel free to tell me anything you know!
gpt
The important thing about the university is that it doesn't exist to educate or advance magic, it expressly exists to contain wizards to prevent magical wars. The fact that the facility are all lazy fat pompous old fools is by clever design not just corruption.

The point of being a student is to be taught all the ways that using magic is difficult and unpredictable and dangerous and how its frankly easier to use the ability as political power with the muggles to get a generous cheese board than to solve a problem magically. There are at least 2 other universities plus various other magic schools and from what we see all of them exist to achieve this in one way or another (its implied in places that the last sorcers did this on purpose).

Also the death rate of students is quite high, which is one of the reasons the university works. Nearly everyone who graduates is well aware of the danger they pose to themselves, which is one of the reasons only the lazy but intelligent survive long enough to teach. Whole groups of students have died merely going to the library. Its fostering this exact mindset on all the graduates that the university really exists for.

They attract in everyone who is likely to be a problem uncontained and let them get on with accidentally turning themselves in small showers of frogs in peace before they can stumble unguided into the really dangerous stuff. It helps that the university itself is a pretty unstable patch of reality to the point that no one really knows the full geography of the building or how many people are in it, so anyone who isn't super cautious gets blown away very easily.

Stubbins is a massive outlyer as hes ambitious, intelligent and doesn't care about traditional magic at all but uses a far safer 'scientific' approach compared to the traditional natural philosophy style of randomly poking at things you don't really understand.