The Aldea Academy for Gifted Youth, located within the larger Aldea Institute, is a Sirius Base institution clandestinely funded by various criminal enterprises, including the Kai family of the Committee, for the purposes of experimenting on young human subjects with special neurological parameters in order to produce humans with psychic abilities, to be offered for sale to Maxicorp and other interested parties for a substantial bounty. Aldea has relationships with various schools for gifted youth on Earth, where students undergo screening tests and brain scans to determine if they are suitable candidates for Aldea. Some of these schools are entirely legitimate, while others, like the Macgregor Academy for Scientific Excellence, have a similar mission to Aldea or receive kickbacks from the school's board to look the other way. Some students accepted into Aldea leave their home institutions entirely to attend, while others take part in Aldea's programs part time while remaining affiliated or enrolled in another school. Macgregor famously sends accepted and screened students to Aldea to take part in its programs while gaining minimal, if any, consent from the children's families, and it is paid richly for this allowance.
While most of Aldea's students, like most of Macgregor's, have gone on to achieve great things and lead normal lives, and a not-insignificant percentage have disappeared or been reported dead under mysterious circumstances, after which they were trafficked to Stein and sold to Maxicorp for incredible sums. While some of these trafficked students were true "successes" of the Aldea and Macgregor methods and possessed real psychic sensitivity, others merely showed progress and potential in ways that Maxicorp's scientists found promising for further development. Far larger numbers of Aldea students, like Macgregor and other affiliate school alumni, have manifested mental illness or other dysfunctional and obsessive tendencies in adult life, and have needed treatment at INDOC centers or even around Tau Ceti. Due to the emerging numbers of non-Cetian psychic children popping up throughout Republic space in the 2140s and '50s, the Astral Directorate has begun to take an interest in the phenomenon and have started to identify former Aldea subjects for scientific investigation.