Corover isn't even, like, a college. You literally can't get a degree there, and even if you could, it would be worthless. Literally every person who's gone there just uses the credit hours to add on to a different degree. It has such a bad rep as a school that you have to hide the fact that you ever went there.—
Gina Nakamura , a snob who doesn't know what she's talking about
The Corover Institute isn't meant to be a college. It's a tool, to help you take the experiences you get in our line of work and transform them into something that normal people can engage with. It's a way of getting credit for what you do, without having to reveal your identity to the world.
Degrees are meaningless. They're like most other pieces of paper that float around society, in that they are meant to represent proof of possessing something (material wealth, ability to drive, an education) but in doing so have rendered themselves utterly useless as actual proof. And they actually can hinder...
E/N : I'm editing this. I don't usually, so that people can see how unhinged Ruby Gray can get about some things, but this got long. TLDR: she objects to the idea of people applying that much significance to a fancy piece of paper, in her words. The background of it is that she thinks she's too smart to need a college degree, and while she might be right, she does actually need to learn a few things. Other than that, she specifically needs a way of showing that she's smart that doesn't involve gassing an educational institute to prove a point.
All that being said, Corover Institute fills a major gap in the
Enhanced way of life, and more people should take advantage of it and the veil of respectability it provides.
Proof of Ability
There's a lot of crossover between kids who end up in
Academics Club , people who volunteer for the
TGB Foundation , and those who go to Corover. They take a similar approach to the superhero life, providing secrecy and support for people who want to go out and get stuff done, but don't necessarily want the people around them to also know that they did the stuff.
As you might imagine, you don't always have a lot of time for homework or a regular college career if you're busy trying to save the world. The hours get kind of erratic, after all. You know your stuff, and in some ways you probably know it better than your peers since you've seen these things in action, but since you learned it while wearing a mask and using your superpower, you don't exactly want to explain how you figured it out.
At Corover, you take a two week intensive course in whatever topic it is, and come away proving that you understand the material to a level acceptable to the public. You save time, both in the classroom and in the office of whoever you would have tried to convince that you don't need to take one of the basic classes.
The Process
First, candidates come in for a consultation with an academic advisor. They don't ask for as much detail as one might think, but mainly help the potential attendee go through the increasingly long list of course offerings and narrow it down to what will be helpful. This might mean something to finish off a class missed because of a monster attack, a way to verify skills gained during an off-planet excursion, or just an intensive to learn the details of a skill someone's picked up just as a result of living a life that includes many practical applications of unusual physics.
Once the person has figured out what they'll take, the course gets scheduled. One disadvantage of the rather diverse curriculum is that some of the intensives have to wait until there's sufficient interest. Sometimes this involves combining a few similar things. The idea is to generalize some very specific experiences, after all.
Each course is held in person, and it's advisable not to do multiple at once since it's meant to either be definitive proof that you know one specific topic or a crash course in all the aspects you weren't aware of. There's a lot of attendance leeway within that, however. Basically, as long as you pass the final exam, you get the credit, and they're pretty flexible about when you can take the exam.
A Few Examples
Just to demonstrate some of how this is meant to work.
- Cooking 101: Not actually as basic as it sounds. Two weeks of cooking food for the other students to order, culminating in a formal dinner with a fancy-ish menu. Recommended for those who've learned things like "how to properly season food" and "how to cook pork chops without them turning dry." Applies to Home Ec type high school courses, or to beginner classes at a culinary institute.
- Italian Mastery: Useful for people who got trapped in a time loop in Rome, or those who got stationed there but can't really explain how they know Italian. The language courses tend not to be so popular because it's one of the skills you can just randomly pick up and not need to explain it before you take a test proving you understand it. Still, it can fill in a few credit requirements.
- First Aid: For those who had to learn emergency field medicine, or someone who has an innate understanding of the human body. This one's good because of its personalized approach to filling in knowledge gaps. You might know how to treat a laser blast, but have you learned basic allergy information?
- Architecture: The engineering courses usually end up rather fussy and specialized, but this one ends up on a lot of people's lists because if you have the power to destroy a building, most of the people around you want you to understand how to avoid that. Good for those who work with disaster cleanup and such. If you know how to shore up a building or how to build a bridge out of nothing, you should be able to count that knowledge for something.
Not For Everyone
Initially, the biggest problem with Corover was that the basic concept was appealing to a lot of people, especially since they weren't advertising the focus on superheroes with busy schedules. Since a lot of secrets would get painfully obvious if half the class books it every time there's an emergency, they needed to figure out how to make Corover as publicly unappealing as possible.
They settled on a similar approach to
Academics Club : make it boring, and sour its reputation. First, they set up the ground work that they couldn't provide a full degree. Everything transfers, and automatically gets filtered through other organizations so it already looks like they're not confident in their certification process. Add in a bunch of bad reviews, to make sure no one wants to go there for academic quality, and jack up the price. Negate the price with a bunch of nebulous scholarships and discounts that don't make any sense.
If anyone is still trying to get in, gently steer them to other programs. Or give them a very unique version of the experience if they're a reporter trying to get the scoop on why Corover still exists despite being so poorly rated.
A Help and a Hindrance
Corover has a close association with Academics Club, both for their approach and for their core audience: young people looking to make something of themselves in the normal world while also developing superheroing skills. AC covers the latter, and pretends that it's for "troubled youths." It's meant to look lame and boring and unhelpful, and thanks to that reputation, Corover is also looked down upon. Some people even assume they're a part of the same organization.
People of Note
There's a lot of these, actually. Too many to name easily. Corover is set up to be a very effective tool for the superheroes of the world, and even a few of the villains, and as such there are a lot of people that would be easily recognized were I to list them. It's not exaggerating to say that if they showed up in the news with a pseudonym, they took courses at Corover.
So you get a few of the basics, and some of the people I know that I think are interesting.
Alanza Corover. Half alien, which is a lot more uncommon among powered people than most people think. She's been running the school for about fifty years, but she's been around for more like two hundred. Her shapeshifter powers have proved beneficial to avoiding attention, as well as gaining perspective on all the different aspects of education. She likes having her name represent the school, and usually goes by her first name to avoid identification issues.
Connor Tackett . Probably one of the most unknowingly famous superheroes out there in the current era. Responsible for public acknowledgment of superheroes. A huge proponent of privacy, and thus the ideals of Corover appeal to him immensely. He's never attended but has taught several of the intensives.
Nicholas Onager . A proud alumnus of the program, he got nearly his entire degree from Corover. As one of the busier superheroes, this is not surprising. He uses his current position as one of the adult leaders in an Academic Club to urge his students to make use of it.
Theofilos Markidus. Big gregarious man with vocal-based powers who helps cover the classes for younger kids. Amiable, earnest, a little overbearing, but unfailingly polite and reasonable. If you offend this man, be prepared to die a slow and painful death due to the sheer force of his well-tempered rationality.
Tyler Boll . A current student. Ty's not the smartest guy, but he's determined and sweet and he's done a lot of things that don't normally get used for a high school diploma. Normally
SIVIC handles these things in-house, but due to circumstances he was really falling behind.
Abominabelle . One of the few examples of a known villain attending. The secrecy aspects aren't as much of a problem as you might think. A bunch of people were weird about it, but then someone pointed out that this was better than her forging a degree, and most of the stuff she wanted to take was literature classes anyway, so it's not like she could turn around and use it to make a bomb.
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