It's his train stop.

Oh good. He steps out of the train and follows that green-haired person's instructions.

And he finds a university campus full of green-haired people. It's well-trafficked, but not swarming, dense but with parks where students are outside with tablets reading or working. There are libraries and research buildings and classrooms and student housing.

He looks around for the place where people enrol as students.

There's an admissions office but it appears to be mid-season, and additionally to require all your secondary school marks and scores and recommendations and independent project work and so on.

What if he just wants to sits on classes?

Still have to be enrolled, they're not a charity.

Hmpf. He will try to surreptitiously gather information on whether their records are digital enough that he'll have a hard time faking them.

Records are pretty much digital! Stuff from distant poorer provinces is still being digitized in some cases but mostly that's for historical records, not for last season's school reports. There's no one actually checking if students who sit in on classes are enrolled, though.

Oh well that is useful, then. What classes are there, around here?

This university seems to specialize in physics, mathematics, computer science, second-millenium history and comparative literature.

Hmm... any classes happening right now?

Lots! They're all mid-season though.

History seems most useful so he'll sit one class in that major and pay attention to a few others (especially compsci and physics) that are within range. He'll stay at the back of the class, though, so as not to draw too much attention.

They're ahead of Earth at compsci and physics but not hundreds of years ahead or anything.

Second millennium history covers an ugly series of wars and how the world settled on the caste system in its present (and presently universal) form and the emergence of the first democracies and early instances of regions having population problems (which they solved with wars or internal mass murder or let starvation sort it).

...what a terrible place. Anything about why they had so many problems with overpopulation so early in their history or is that taken for granted?

It is considered fairly obvious that any society will have problems with overpopulation unless they have lots and lots of people dying very young for some reason.

Uh huh. Does he have access to the library?

He could leap the little turnstile thing fast enough no one noticed.

Yup he'll do that and look up books on biology.

Locals live for forty local years and are fertile for fifteen of them and most people have a mild preference for a child every spring of their fertile years and a strong preference for a child at least every two springs. Adoption sort of counts and living with children who aren't yours sort of counts and multiparent arrangements sort of count but the unrestricted birth rate given universal access to free birth control and abortion is five children per woman. 

Every country in the world has population controls. This one, Anitam, auctions credits by caste. If you have a child without a credit they get adopted out and you get sterilized.

...okay so they will probably be more resistant than humans to being turned, if that even works on them, that's useful to know. What are other countries' population controls like?

Some places do lottery instead of auction; some places do two-children-per-family; some places award extra child credits for service to the nation; some places do a mix of all of those.

Do they all sterilise people?

A couple kill the babies instead.