Science Fiction1 and Fantasy are full of magic school stories, from contemporary and urban fantasy colleges to second world universities, private schools, academies, and boarding schools. Many of these tales contain horror elements, even if they aren’t monsters and mayhem through and through. Increasingly, these sorts of stories—especially ones set in some version of higher education—are getting branded as “dark academia,” an aesthetic that uncritically privileges a certain, exclusive sort of scholarly “life of the mind” and mixes that ideal with elements of mystery, crime, danger, and, well, general darkness. And that’s a problem.
There are compelling reasons for “dark” or “gritty” representations of college and grad school, even and especially in a fantasy setting. But as a subgenre, magic school stories tend to skip over those compelling reasons in favor of external monsters and villains. In the process, they miss the fact that the murderer isn’t just calling from inside the house—it is the house. Or, rather, it’s the ivory tower (and its self-appointed gatekeepers).
Think about the last magic school story you read or watched (yes, even if it’s that one) and you can probably identify some core elements of the subgenre: the school is attended by a privileged few; many of the students are legacies (i.e., their parents attended the school) or, at the very least, not first-generation; the protagonist is a first-generation student or very nearly so, and they struggle to adjust to the institution; the school ostensibly exists to provide career training (even in series where a magical high school diploma is the terminal degree); students take courses in distinct fields or areas of magic; and, there are faculty experts in those fields present to offer guidance and support (at least, in theory).
In other words, magic schools work a lot like real-world schools. And, as such, they’re built on some unstated assumptions about who and what schools are for…assumptions that are spelled out dramatically by recent studies about higher education:
In contrast to common representations of the student experience in fiction, an estimated 14-18% of students experience homelessness while pursuing their degrees, and three out of every five students experience basic needs insecurity.
Prior to the pandemic, higher education outlets were already reporting a mental health crisis among students as approximately 34% of undergraduates sought mental health treatment in 2019. During the pandemic, that percentage shot even higher, with approximately 50% of surveyed students screening positive for anxiety or depression.
We know that graduate students are at higher risk of mental illness due to exploitative labor conditions, a collapsed job market, and an often toxic and abusive advising system. And these issues extend to many faculty, as well. About 75% of all college faculty in the US are adjuncts, part-time or temporary employees who are often hired course-by-course, are meagerly compensated, have no way of knowing if their employment will continue into the next term or semester, and aren’t eligible for health benefits. In fact, in 2019, 38% of instructional staff experienced basic needs insecurity. And this is how academia treats the people it allows to remain inside its hallowed halls.
The ivory tower has, to put it bluntly, a whiteness problem. Black and Indigenous students of color (BISOC) make up approximately 45% of undergraduate enrollment in the U.S., but represent only about 33% of college graduates in recent years. And that one-third of graduates is actually deceptive, because it includes graduating Latinx students, who make up about 35.6% of the total undergraduate population.
These already low numbers dwindle quickly in grad school: about 20.4% of graduate students are BISOC, and about 9.2% are Latinx. (And these representation issues are even worse among faculty: only 14% of U.S. faculty are BIPOC.)
Disabled students also face significant barriers to retention and graduation. At least 19.4% of the U.S. undergraduate population, or 1 in 5 students, disclose having a disability. And approximately 25% of those students drop out within the first year of their program due to factors ranging from lack of support and resources to outright institutional ableism. A look at graduate school enrollment statistics reveals that only 11.9% of graduate students report a disability.
Oh, and, as of last year? 33.8% of college graduates hold jobs that don’t actually require a degree. (There is some data to suggest that only about 27% of people holding an undergraduate degree find a job in or related to their field of study.) And, whether or not they end up in a job that even requires one, students take on an average of $30,000 in debt to get their degrees.
All of these numbers should tell you three things:
- higher education isn’t accessible or inclusive;
- college isn’t necessarily or even normally a safe place, and graduate school is often even worse;
- and it’s hard to know if the experience was truly worth it in the end (even though many graduates, myself included, would do it again).
But what exactly does any of this have to do with fictional stories about magical education? The short answer: everything. Or, it should.
Magic school stories are, at heart, about coming of age and coming into one’s own. Attending a magic school is supposed to be an essential stage of (or, perhaps, an essential obstacle in) the journey to adulthood and professional life. That’s true even when the magic school in question is a college or grad school. In the happy stories, the magic school is a door through which an exciting, fulfilling, and, well, magical future can be found. But very few magic school stories are happy or uplifting when they’re set in some version of higher education.
In the more-common, less-happy stories, attending magic school is revelatory, but not in a good way. The knowledge students leave with (about themselves and the world around them) is hard-won and not necessarily worth the cost. But even in these cynical stories, students somehow have a future to look forward to—one in which they get to keep doing magic.
In Naomi Novik’s The Scholomance series, for example, protagonist Galadriel (El) Higgins knows that if she lives past high school graduation, she’ll either find work as a maleficer of mass destruction or create her own path while resisting the dire tendencies of her innate magical ability. There is no future in which she is forced to leave magic behind, or to juggle part-time magic positions in a losing effort to keep a roof over her head.
And in Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, protagonist Galaxy (Alex) Stern finds herself attending an alternate, magical Yale University on a full-ride scholarship which, of course, has some serious strings attached. While struggling with coursework and not one but two hidden curricula, Alex discovers that the glamorous world of academic magic she finds herself in is corrupt to the core. At the bleak end of the novel, literally and figuratively battered and bruised, her focus has narrowed down to one thing: rescuing a fallen friend. But she’s also managed to make it through the semester with a passing GPA, so technically she’s still on track to graduate and get on with her life.
At the end of both stories, the characters are still students, doing their best to graduate while juggling their magical existence and their mundane studies. But while magic school stories like these explore the impact of magic on students, they don’t often explore the impact of scholarship on magic. It’s one thing to learn you’re a magician, it’s a very different thing to learn how to be a magician within an institution dedicated to the research and teaching of magic. Because you can bet that that system affects everything from ideas about who counts as a magician to what counts as magic. And you can also bet—as so many of these stories already make clear—that the system itself is broken.
So, honestly, it’s wild that even magic school stories about the brokenness and corruption of the system assume that graduates will successfully navigate that system and become fully-actualized professionals.
When you come of age in a broken system, the identity you crafted in school is rarely the one you get to occupy in professional life. And that’s assuming you’re admitted in the first place, able to stay enrolled, and have or obtain the support and resources you need to earn your degree—feats which the academy makes nearly impossible unless you are already familiar with the inner workings of the institution (via your parents or network), are independently wealthy, and are able-bodied enough to throw caution (or work-life balance) to the wind. Because, in reality? Schools, magic or otherwise, are almost always places of privilege that cater largely to the privileged, all while selling the myth that they are for everyone.
Take Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy in SyFy’s TV adaptation of The Magicians. A magic school located in upstate New York (because of course), it is considered to be the “premier institution for the study of magic in North America.” And with the word “pedagogy” right in its title, you’d think the school would be innovative about (or at least up-to-date on) the latest in teaching and learning research. Spoiler: it’s not.
Brakebills takes great pains to admit only the “right” students. And that, apparently, means students who are able to perform well on unexpected, timed exams meant to serve as a comprehensive “examination of … magical aptitude.” Students are provided no accommodations and no alternative ways to demonstrate their skill, knowledge, or talent. As someone who does learning design for a living, I can confidently say that this sort of exam isn’t well-designed to measure a student’s content-specific knowledge. Instead, it ends up measuring skills and knowledge that are construct irrelevant like time-management, familiarity with standardized testing, and the ability to focus in a noisy classroom environment. In other words, the exam isn’t measuring magical aptitude at all—it’s measuring neurotypicality and privilege.
This mismeasurement is exemplified by Julia Wicker, who fails the written part of the Brakebills exam. When Julia asks for another chance to prove herself, citing the fact that the test’s questions kept changing, she’s told that, whatever magical ability she may have once possessed, it’s clear she has none now. Her reply is, characteristically, acute: “Don’t you want students who make actual inquiry?” The blank look on the nameless administrator’s face says it all: Brakebills does not want that. Not one bit.
Because there are no other magic schools around, Julia is forced to become a “hedge witch”—scraping and stealing to access any amount of magic she can. As almost all of the students who do attend Brakebills have or affect wealthy and worldly lifestyles, the show becomes a tale of haves and have nots. The hedges, frequently more talented than enrolled students but pushed to the sidelines, serve as a sort of institutional boogie man, foils for all that is wrong in the magical world. But that’s not really a compelling narrative arc.
As much as the show sets up this great divide between magicians and hedges, the only things that seem to truly distinguish the groups are resource scarcity (hedges) and perceived lawfulness (magicians). Graduates of Brakebills go on to much the same sort of magical “careers” the hedges have—if vague gestures toward doing magical stuff in a way that supports, at minimum, an upper middle class lifestyle even counts as “career.”
So, the university system in The Magicians is failing more than just the students it rejects—it’s failing the students it admits and then expels, the students it trains and then forgets, the superstar students who never go on to become professors or deans in their own right because, hey, there are only so many positions in the world and they’re all already full. While The Magicians does a fairly compelling job of exploring what might happen when the institution doesn’t admit you in the first place, we don’t see much diversity of experience among enrolled students.
But this isn’t just a problem in The Magicians. It’s a problem in the subgenre. By presenting institutions of magical education as places where the darkness sometimes creeps in, instead of places designed to perpetuate systemic inequality, these stories imply that the institution, as well as the kids it supposedly trains, is ultimately alright.
We never explore what happens when your admission letter extends a welcome that’s not followed through by faculty, staff, or your fellow students because you don’t fit into the narrow ideal of what a student should be. Or what happens when the people who you’re trusting to guide you through this process are toxic or abusive or have earned tenure and simply don’t care anymore. We don’t learn what happens when, degree in hand, you discover that there are three full-time, benefited jobs in your field in the whole world, and hundreds or thousands of applicants for each of them.
I can tell you lots of stories about what you do in those situations when you’re a “mundane” student, some of them empowering but most of them disheartening or infuriating or gutting.
But if you add magic? I can’t think of many stories that engage these issues in a sustained way.
As journalist and historian David M. Perry recently tweeted (in response to the hype around Netflix’s The Chair), “we need good storytelling about power on college campuses.” This is especially true in SFF, where, as author and academic Malka Older points out, we have this possibility for “speculative resistance,” for imagining better futures by being intentional about the ways we’re making things up and avoiding the siren song of path dependency.
Dark academia is path dependent. It relies on our imperfect knowledge of academic institutions to create a dark fantasy nestled within the aesthetic trappings of a life of the mind that, for the record, was only ever possible historically because of intergenerational wealth built within colonial systems. While some recent SFF novels create powerful critiques of the corruption at the heart of magical education (Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, for example) and of the institution’s complicity in the exploitation and destruction of (minority, disadvantaged, first-gen, disabled) students in order to maintain the status quo (Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series), there’s so much ground left to cover.
If we want to imagine better, more magical futures we need to go beyond dark academia to grapple with the real and urgent issues of systemic inequality in higher education today: student debt, the academic mental health crisis, ableism, precarity and houselessness among students and adjunct instructors, exploitation, exclusion. Adding magic to schools doesn’t erase or invalidate these issues; it amplifies them. Magic is as much about power as it is about wonder, after all, and education is as much about control as it is about creating possibilities. Mixing the two together is more than “dark”—it’s a frighteningly effective recipe for more precarity, more exploitation, more abuse. Magic stories are not only missing an opportunity when they fail to engage with these issues, they’re also endorsing and replicating centuries’ old systems of power, privilege, and control–systems that won’t change until their real horrors are finally recognized.
Courtney Floyd survived grad school by writing about magic. Her fiction has appeared in Fireside Magazine and Tales of the Talisman, and her lighthearted horror audio drama, The Way We Haunt Now, is available wherever you get your podcasts. You can find her online at www.courtney-floyd.com and on Twitter @cannfloyd.
[1]Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy is one example of a science-fiction magic school. Technically, nobody at the school is studying magic and the things that seem to be magic are usually technology-related. But if, as the saying goes, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” then the combined advanced technologies represented at Oomza University make it a very magical place indeed.
We also need to deal with the refusal of professors to realize that higher education should actually prepare students to get a job and the refusal of employers to recognize that higher education does give students skills to use at their job. For example, whenever I’m asked to summarize an article, I use skills developed as a nearly-eighteen-year-old in British Lit Survey class (I escaped high school a year early and went on to college). Professors need to communicate with employers about skills and knowledge needed and employers need to stop giving the “You don’t have any experience–you only have a degree” response to degreed jobseekers, and stop giving the “You don’t have a degree–you only have experience” to non-degreed jobseekers.
And a general education course focused on job interviews and cover letters/videos should be part of the curriculum.
I live in an area where locals’ talents are ignored in favor of incomers; apparently employers don’t want to take advantage of the products of area schools and universities.
I didn’t have any school-related mental health challenges ’til I started looking for work and found out that most employers are close-minded about higher education. Despite the prevalence of the “You don’t have a degree-you only have experience” response, all the people I know who didn’t go to college are much more successful than I am.
I also suspect that talented people in depressed areas of town are overlooked in favor of incomers. Why can’t they be hired and the ones who want to start their own businesses receive small business loans? I’m thinking here of the Tor article that discussed a show that addressed the topic of gentrification.
I live in a multi-ethnic middle class neighborhood that, because of the train and more building (which no one likes) of high-priced condos/apartments/houses, could be in danger of gentrification via housing i.e. tax us out of ownership, buy up houses, then demolish & squeeze in more high-priced condos/apartments/houses.
Employers only need to look at people’s skills and if they’re not “my way or the highway.”
Didn’t Julia failed because it was part of a deliberate plan between Dean Fogg and Jane Chatwin to defeat The Beast? Season 1 ep 12 – “Thirty-Nine Graves”
But what exactly does any of this have to do with fictional stories about magical education?
That was exactly what I was thinking.
The short answer: everything. Or, it should.
Well, I disagree. Obviously, my view is as subjective as yours but I’m not reading fantasy novels to read about a critique of the shortcomings of real-life higher education in the US.
But that’s just me.
I’m surprised Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko wasn’t mentioned here. The Institute of Special Technologies has an extreme method of keeping their students in line.
Although at least some of your critique of higher education is US-specific, it’s still thought-provoking for me. I’ve been stuck on a magical-university story for a while, and you may have helped to unstick me.
Thanks.
I’m curious if you’ve read Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles. While not without other flaws, one of the ongoing struggles the main character experiences is how to pay for his magical college experience and how to juggle his side hustle as a working musician with the demands of his professors. To be honest, while I found that aspect of it interesting in terms of reckoning with some of the real world problems usually glossed over in fantasy, I also found it tedious to read about, while recognizing that someone who faced similar struggles might really appreciate seeing it represented in fiction.
Speaking of Nnedi Okorafor, don’t forget the Akata Witch series, where Leopard People can attend magic school, but you may not get what you expect.
Much of higher education is now designed as a business. The goal is to get students to take more classes and spend more money rather than any value. It is not a vocational training because jobs in the real world isn’t by itself the purpose of higher education (and largely unrelated to education as well as unpredictable). It also would not be profitable to prepare people for purely jobs as they are unlikely to spend excessively getting “useless” classes.
The thing is, higher education is also meant to broaden and enhance someone BEYOND being just another corporate drone who makes the maximum amount of money. The value of education is exposure to philosophy, critical thing, history, and other subjects to make a person a more rounded one. That has no price, no matter how much they keep charging from it.
And yes, I’ve worked in academia.
Man, there’s a lot in this article…
I’m not entirely sure I agree with your three theses as stated:
All of these numbers should tell you three things:
higher education isn’t accessible or inclusive;
college isn’t necessarily or even normally a safe place, and graduate school is often even worse;
and it’s hard to know if the experience was truly worth it in the end (even though many graduates, myself included, would do it again).
The first bullet point would be more accurate as “Overall, American higher education is not nearly as accessible and as inclusive as it should be.” I’m not sure what the second bullet actually means, since no place in the world is necessarily or even normally a safe place. And finally the last bullet point is true of any endeavor ever tried.
Now to the subject: you’ve neglected to mention what American colleges are for: they are trade schools for middle class employment (or were meant to be). A student learns specific skills for people who will act as go-betweens in a capitalist economic system. What are things that a corporate worker needs to be able to do? They need to be able to read and think analytically, communicate reasonably effectively, and write well enough that the suits understand what they’re saying.
Those are precisely skills that are supposed to be learned and honed in college… which is why college education has boomed since the rise of the middle class in the mid 20th century. In the past, people would major in whatever they wanted to and then just got any old jobs in the workforce… and mostly succeeded just fine. It’s only been recently (past 20 years) that suddenly everyone is demanding “results” from their college education…. probably due to the inexplicably massive increase in the cost of college.
What was just niche education for the very rich or the very curious in the 19th century, became regular practice as corporate America grew and needed more middle-man jobs. The privilege based on class, race, gender, etc etc, inherited from corporate culture, was baked right in the foundations of higher education. It was the GI Bill that actually opened the door for most college grads in the 40s and 50s.
***
In other words, no education system is free from the implicit bias and foundational leanings of the society or community that it is meant to serve.
“Because there are no other magic schools around, Julia is forced to become a “hedge witch”—scraping and stealing to access any amount of magic she can. As almost all of the students who do attend Brakebills have or affect wealthy and worldly lifestyles, the show becomes a tale of haves and have nots. The hedges, frequently more talented than enrolled students but pushed to the sidelines, serve as a sort of institutional boogie man, foils for all that is wrong in the magical world. But that’s not really a compelling narrative arc.“
I don’t understand. The show (and the book in its own way) is tackling an inequality that exists in the real world. Why is that wrong?
As always, you’re welcome to disagree with the points made in this article or by other comments, as long as you’re engaging in the discussion in a way that’s both civil and constructive, rather than simply dismissive. See Tor.com’s commenting guidelines, particularly point #7, for further information.
This was much more serious of a read than I anticipated. I will ponder for a bit before I offer up a legitimate response.
But for now, will be off-topic and will just state that my current favourite playlists on youtube are all the ones tagged “Dark Academia”. Not sure why, but that vibe is truly fantastic for background/writing/reading music.
A modern university may exist because of colonialism and may even have been founded as an outpost of empire very deliberately. A medieval university like Oxford or Cambridge goes back too far for any such thing. Also German universities inasmuch as they inspire American universities are from a second-rate imperial power.
I have only skimmed The Magicians and understand that that whole series is meant to be satire. In my limited experience of books that I have finished the first-generation character who attends the magic school proves that they can do magic and a mentor sends them off to the school so that they can learn to refine or control their power. The character will have the power whether or not they can get any specific magical job. It at least used to happen in our world that a teacher had a brilliant student who might not have come from a traditional college background and said, “You SHOULD go to college” because otherwise their mind would rot. This seems to be the model here.
A good trope for many, many fantasy novels whether or not they have schools is magician as Kohen. Not just anyone can do it and the special lineage entitles you to do a few tasks enlisting the supernatural on behalf of the people.
Although this article mostly concentrates on US higher education, much of the same criticisms could be levelled at the UK private school* system most notably featured in Harry Potter.
* Known in the UK confusingly as ‘public schools’, compared to ‘state schools’ which are the tax funded ones, because Reasons.
The author’s problem lies more with the choice of magic system in books. If the magic system is designed so that magic passes in a genetic lineage of a few people, of course magic schools are constructed to serve a privileged elite and legacy students. The Harry Potter books did try to expose this privilege as being the tip of an iceberg of exploitation, FWIW.
There are many day-to-day struggles that could be more “on stage” if a novel is trying to tell a story where they fit. It is quite possible that in a rousing tale of adventure, the writer or editor might decide they don’t fit.
I feel like none of the points made here are strictly wrong, though I feel like it takes some complicated mental gymnastics to look at “The Ninth House” and say “this is expressly a book about an outsider to the system (and IIRC a woman of color?) getting embroiled in a system that inherently needs to be stopped, but it doesn’t count because she doesn’t fail out of school.”
Recognizing these struggles is clearly important, but I think that all of the works cited here are bringing something really valuable to the conversation, just not in the exact, specific way that the author wants. Which is fine, but it isn’t a failing of the works.
Every magic school book I’ve read addresses these problems. It’s a common theme across them. I’ve not read some of the ones cited in the article but it seems to me that the protagonist in school stories is always an outsider who for some reason doesn’t “belong” there and who represents a group that should be more accepted, and that is a major source of conflict in the story.
“We never explore what happens when your admission letter extends a welcome that’s not followed through by faculty, staff, or your fellow students because you don’t fit into the narrow ideal of what a student should be. Or what happens when the people who you’re trusting to guide you through this process are toxic or abusive or have earned tenure and simply don’t care anymore.”
The book that sprang to mind was “Three Parts Dead” by Max Gladstone – which starts with the protagonist expelled from school (by almost lethal methods) because she made a complaint about an exploitative teacher. But it’s not the ongoing focus of the book (although her teacher does re-appear). The other one that comes to mind is “Fledgling” / “Saltation” by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller, where local politics & prejudice start affecting academic institutions – sometime in quite nasty ways.
“If we want to imagine better, more magical futures we need to go beyond dark academia to grapple with the real and urgent issues of systemic inequality in higher education today: student debt, the academic mental health crisis, ableism, precarity and houselessness among students and adjunct instructors, exploitation, exclusion.”
I’ve seen these explored in other genres but not in sff, and even then the solutions are usually individual not systemic.The only really inclusive magical school I can think of are “special schools” in Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway and TJ Klune’s “The House in the Cerulean Sea” but neither are college level or academically focused.
I now want a story about an academic administrator at a magical university who comes in and tries to fix the systematic issues with magic complicating everything.
It’s both interesting and depression to discover that Diana Wynne Jones’s The Year of the Griffin (sequel to Dark Lord of Derkholm) is as topical now as it was the year it was written, if not more so. Worth a read!
Great article.
Magic is also interesting in that it creates a personal power that can either counterbalance or allow detachment from the power of institutions and even society. Well, depending on the specifics of the magic. But I mean, say you’ve got this institution that is all about getting people to toe a narrow line of perpetuating privilege in return for lucrative jobs and positions embedded in a stratified society.
And say magic lets a person conjure themselves a hidden home, furnishings, food and so on, and generally puts them in a position where they can say “You can take this job and shove it!” and lose relatively little.
You have the basis for a conflict. Also potentially the basis for a very different kind of institution, where participation is much more voluntary and less dependent on, for instance, obsession over grading and regimented behaviour.
That’s just one possibility for how the existence of magic could allow for changes in what kind of institution and power structure is viable.
Caveat: Not read much of the article yet. It looks very interesting and I want to do it justice rather than struggle to read while forcing myself to stay awake.
My initial thought is that there is going to be a hierarchy of privilege in a magic school, if the magic system in that universe is not an ability shared by the whole population.
It is noticeable that many novels on the theme have a system which is inherited by an aristocratic class, and the protagonist is either a member of that class and comes to realise that it is corrupt and privileged, or else they are from a lower class and are constantly made aware of their lack of status, and fight the system.
Looking forward to seeing if and how these issues are discussed in the article
I see I’m not the first to note that Year of the Griffin by Diana Wynne Jones tackles some of these topics!
The only one of your examples that I’m familiar with is the SyFy version of “The Magicians”. On first viewing I figured it only existed because the elevator pitch was “Dystopian Hogwarts grad school age so there’s sex and drugs.” (and BTW dystopian-ize everything else with it – children’s literature, authors, school as a concept, trust as a concept, etc.)
One could point out that the Unseen University on the Discworld (Terry Pratchett), which predates many of the others, spends time teaching students when NOT to use magic because it’s likely to cause the end of the universe or some other interference with dinnertime. And the professors seem to spend their time avoiding students. Most learning comes about through student experimentation and research on their own, which is probably closer to really happened in “universities” back in the days when books were rare and expensive (because hand-copied) and a big part of “going to a place of learning” was “going to a place that had a library”.
I believe that the word “privileged” is not the right dictionary meaning for the idea it has become used for, and the older 1960s/70s phrase of “advantaged”/”disadvantaged” is more appropriate. “Privilege” entails benefit given by others. People who have magic (perhaps a euphemism for intellectual ability) often have the ADVANTAGE of learning to use it at home from family, because it tends to run in families – but this fails for two big categories: those who have become estranged from family (including orphaned or otherwise separated), and spontaneous prodigies who exceed the abilities of their family (and worse exceed their families’ ability to appreciate the talent). The segregation continues as those with the ADVANTAGE of family support go on to “higher” education. Note that some of those with this ADVANTAGE will be very much NOT PRIVILEGED in the greater society; consider the Weasley family, with lots of family support but looked down upon by “finer society” because Dad is a lower-middle civil servant (while people like the Malfoys are obviously old money).
Without referencing an actual “school of magic”, there have also been older stories in which people with magic or psi abilities (again, euphemisms for intellect) were actively sought out by leadership as a “natural resource”. (one example: Anne McCaffrey, the Pegasus sequence with the character Daffyd op Owen.) (This can include a “Cinderella” aspect of some families or towns being in a hurry to turn over “the witch child”, while others try to hide their child from detection.)
I might add that the SF book ANATHEM by Stephenson goes over many of the same themes, Although the ‘reform’ at the end of allowing children will mean that most of the female students will decide not to have them, or to give up their careers. I understand there’s a molecule’s worth of lip service given to equality in child-raising, while anyone in the real world, as we saw during the pandemic, knows exactly whose careers will suffer.
It should be noted that a lot of “magic academy” stories are written in countries other than the US. And the academic system in other places doesn’t suffer from all the same ills (though it might have different ones). For example, in most of the Western World, a student would not have to take crazy student loans to study – education would be state-sponsored, and thus much more accessible.
You might want to look at the Brothers Strugatski novel “Monday Begins on Saturday” as an example – “intergenerational wealth built within colonial systems” could not be less relevant to that world.
American writers can write about American problems, sure. But please don’t turn your nose at writers from other places writing about entirely different issues. Ironically, I find American-centrism, acting like the whole world is, or should be, like the USA, an extremely colonialist mindset.