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| The intake of wizards at Hogwarts is roughly ten children in each house per year - Harry Potter's year in Gryffindor has eight named members, five boys and three girls, and there is a fanon assumption that there are two more female members who have never been named. So, 8-10 students a house, 32-40 a year, 224-280 students in total at any given time, of whom around four - over one percent of the entire school-age wizarding population of the United Kingdom - are Weasleys at any given time up to the end of Book 5, and many of whom are in some way related to the Black family. Most wizarding families seem to live long lives and not have so many children, but it might not be unreasonable to estimate that there are 300 families of on average 6 members with children of age to be at Hogwarts, perhaps another 400 who are recent graduates and/or childless (although in general wizards seem not to have any idea of contraception), some smaller families where the grandparents have died off without being replaced by grandchildren... I think you could fit the entire population into a good-sized village. So, yes, tertiary education would have to be a single small institution - assuming that half of the Hogwarts intake wanted to go, and courses were on average three years, you'd have a student body rather smaller than my rather small college - with tuition either really quite expensive or very heavily subsidised by the mysterious coffers of the Ministry. Nonetheless, it does seem to be an odd omission, given that the social and economic structure of the wizarding world already makes dick-all sense. |
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