Oh yeah i just remembered what i meant to post. Okay so i think people who perceive the student commies as extremely gatekeepy and stuck up just. may not ever have seen what happens when you go into the commie quest with a Harry who has low int and/or hasn't read that many books like...

if Harry has only read Hjelmdallermann, Steban and Ulixes meet him at that level and discuss Hjelmdallermann. If Harry has only read the alphabet book for little kids, they discuss the alphabet. There's an option for Harry to say "I may not have read many books, but I tell a good story" and then just talk about the case or random shit he got up to during the last three days, and not only will the students be polite about it and tell Harry that he brings an interesting new perspective to the group, they'll be visibly enraptured by his stories. They'll initially say that they do entrance exams and things like that, but they immediately stop insisting on it and, if the circumstances align, offer an option to join the group by simply punching Steban in the face. They're even very patient with "are women bourgeois".

I went into the meeting also thinking "Wow, these guys think i'm not worth their time unless i've read all these books" but once i go over it again, there's not really any hard evidence that they think that. They do brag a lot about how well-read they are and broadly assume that everyone present knows what they're talking about when they're quoting theory, but the whole "they're a petit-bourg intellectual class who think they're too good to interact with actual working people" interpretation seems overly harsh (especially since they have tried to recruit actual working people).

On the Doylist level, the encounter is written that way so that everyone, regardless of what build their Harry is, can finish the commie quest in a satisfying way. But DE is a well-written game where gameplay mechanics are justified with plot and characterization, so the reason why every build of Harry can succeed at the commie quest is because Steban is written as a person who, while certainly being all kinds of a dork, seeks dialogue with you no matter what you hit him with (figuratively as well as literally)