@Zael The elites in question are still just normal people. The ones at the academy are becoming practitioners and maybe shouldn't even be considered "human" anymore. In all of these "wuxia" series becoming like that tends to have certain limitations or requirements. Some stories, anyone has the potential to cultivate the special martial arts but it's immensely expensive in time and resources to make even one person strong enough to matter so a lot of people never bother with anything past basics. Others, only certain people can even cultivate at all in the first place and it's still stupidly expensive to boot.
I forget what it's like in this series in particular, but the basic answer either way is nobody can afford to give that kind of training to all their subordinates. There's also other concerns I suppose even if money isn't the issue this time around. The people running things probably don't want every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the streets running around with super powers, y'know? I think one of the pages mentioned an exam for entering the academy, there's one way of limiting it to people they consider "worthy" of the training. You'll notice a recurring theme in martial arts content in general where the teachers are super picky about who they'll train.