Talk:Academy City/@comment-28700136-20160611135518/@comment-25431873-20160614004140

Keep in mind that the founding of Academy City is not the same as the implementation of the Power Curriculum Program. After all, the city was apparently just 5 research institutes in the beginning. It is possible that AC was founded 50 years ago and the Curriculum is an incredibly recent thing in its history, like 20 years ago.

And, seeing how the Curriculum is so unreliable that 60% of all espers are Level 0s and the current Level 5s (all teenagers I remind) seem to be the first ones in AC's history (based on Aiwass' comment that Aleister waited 50 years for someone like Accelerator), I would theorize that the early stages of the Program were even more unreliable than that, with no Parameter List to screen test people genetically or outdated methods to develop powers resulting in people coming out with no AIM fields at all or as Level 0s/1s. It is possible those early espers, and now adult espers, are either few in numbers or have little to no power to speak of.

The current population of AC seem to support this: the majority of espers seem under 18, so since most take the Curriculum somewhere between 5 and 12 years old (theorized), the Curriculum is able to garantee you becoming an Esper (read: actually only garanteed that you will have an AIM field), no matter how weak, since only fairly recently.