The leader's only purpose in the game is to use one of their three randomly generated abilities (except exploration, which all of them seem to have) once per turn. The only potential exception to this is the leader, who we know next to nothing about while playing them, and their fate after retirement is left unknown, so in my opinion they do not count as a person at all.
In such circumstances, the people at ground-level are just as important and as interesting as the people at the top, and yet they are all regarded as nothing but statistics. This game is all about colonizing and eventually terraforming Mars, the first project of its kind. Depending upon how their education went, they would provide small but permanent bonuses to the university after graduation. Spellcaster University's population were living, breathing entities with their own dreams and desires. Spellcaster University, for all its flaws (they are still working on it so they might solve them in the future) has 2 things going for it: A living, dynamic population of people with unique wants and needs, and a robust, flexible card system. Though I know that this just a demo, I am concerned about how rigid and inflexible this game currently is, especially when compared to similar games like Spellcaster University, Civilization, and Endless Space.