The students who do best in Elsewhere are offered positions in environmental agencies that secretly negotiate with the fae elsewhere in the country.
Here is the thing: For perhaps the first time in their extended existence, the Fair Folk know what it means to worry about the future. The Elsewhere it not quite its own world; it still shadows this one. But from, say, the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, when people turned their hands towards iron on a larger scale than ever before, the doors started to close. The Elsewhere became something less overlaid across the hills and forests, and more a thing apart, a strange nonsensical shadow world. They say in 1839 all but a few of the Gentry fled Ireland, for example. For the first time the world was becoming inhospitable.
But they are cunning, and they are desperate, and they adapted. Elsewhere University was founded in the late 1800s, and by the 1930s it had become one of a handful of places where the Elsewhere could seep through one more, reattaching itself to the real world in new ways. And iron has not overtaken the world entirely; there are still free spaces, green spaces, deserts and forests and people fighting to keep them empty. A future is worth too much to gamble; environmental studies majors, Involved or not, who are full of anger and hope and fire, are protected.
And later, if they’re sought out by others who Know, the job offer is either already expected or makes a great deal of the old school traditions suddenly much more sense.
