The idea for this story is quite amazing. The technology for travelling to distant planets is a kind of compact wormhole tunnel. It is also used to get around planet Earth rather quickly. You can work in New York and live in Arizona thanks to such technology. Very cool and intriguing.
The idea of the "bootcamp" follows that technology. How do you train people who go to live on faraway planets that might have a dangerous environment? You send them off as senior high school students to to a another planet for a few days where it is survival of the fitness. It is not meant to be fatal to the students, but, well, things happen. All in all, we have a great adventure lined up. It's the gender issues that show the age of this book. In fact, there is a lot of stereotyping. It makes it seem very much like a young adult book of the fifties, which I think it was intended to be. Even though it was written in another time and place, I still cringed. The style of writing brought down the ranking of the book.