Respected Scholar Talent says "checks to interact with institutes of learning" What are the institutes of learning? I'm a bit confused with this.

Whatever you want to designate, a university, scientific think tank, cloistered monastic order, assassin's academy, etc

An example would be in the adventure at the back of the F&D core book...the plot requires the players to infiltrate the secure archives of a university on Eriadu. There are myriad ways the PCs could make that happen, and Respected Scholar would be useful.

When I ran it for my son, he tried to pass himself off as alumni...though now that I think about it, we might have forgotten to take that Talent into account...!

When I ran "Jewel of Yavin," it sort of turned out that most of the player characters each had some angle they could use to approach each of the bidders. The archaeologist had Respected Scholar, and Shreya Odessa was a professor from the University at Sambra.

It is definitely one of those talents that can be useless or very handy depending on the setting, and how creative you and your players are.

Some examples of settings that where Respected Scholar could be useful.

A library or archive.

An archaeological dig

A science lab

Local/Regional Summit on ....

Yag'Dhul (if you're good at math)

GM discretion, really

It's a talent a PC takes to tell their GM "Please give me some places of learning to interact with." They want their character to be meeting fellow intellectuals and gaining knowledge from them to help the party

It gives the GM a way to feed the party plot whilst also providing a player with their moment to shine. The galaxy is enormous, billions of systems, most uncharted or little known. So feel free to make your own up. Even on a well known world an entire campaign could run without going to a single place used in any of Cannon or Legends.