College Is "High School, Part 2"

Title Card: This is an Iowa State College production.
Joel Robinson: Iowa State College, the high school after high school.

— Mystery Science Theater 3000, "The Home Economics Story"

The transition from high school to college is typically one of the biggest transitions you'll make in your entire life. But not on TV. On TV, it's just high school without your mom and dad.

There are so many High School tropes that if a work relies on them, it's got real trouble once its characters graduate. To prevent them from graduating out of the story, the story follows them to college, but they still want to use the same tropes, hence why college seems to be exactly like high school. You've still got a stuck-up principal, only this time he's called the "dean" (and he might have fancier glasses). You've still got characters seeking a Wild Teen Party, only now they're part of Wacky Fratboy Hijinx. The students are still the same types of characters; you've still got Jerk Jocks, Valley Girls, and nerds, and you've still got youth-induced relationship drama. You've still got lockers into which to stuff the nerds, and you've still got bells and hall monitors to tell you when class is supposed to start.

As with many tropes, this one runs a spectrum. In some cases, it's just a way of showing that people don't grow up that much the minute they turn into independent adults, or even explicitly describes college antics as something these guys had wanted to do all through high school but couldn't because of high school's authority figures. This is particularly common in "frat comedies" like Animal House or in fictional sororities, where the women will usually be tyrannical and unpleasant. But on the other end of the spectrum, the authority figures are just as active in college as they are in high school, leading to such insanity as professors putting college students in detention for texting in class.

The reality, as always, is not as it is on TV, but the extent to which it differs depends on the institution. Most universities will acknowledge that their students are adults and treat them accordingly, so they won't micromanage them — i.e. they don't particularly care if you don't show up to class, because it's your life and your education, and if you want to waste it, go right ahead. But some professors might dock your grade for things like not showing up on time or using your phone in class. And while the teachers and administrators aren't usually going to get on your case for misbehavior, there usually is a separate campus police who'll do it. There's also, obviously, a big cultural divide between certain institutions; a college in the American South will worship its football players much like an equivalent high school might, but you won't see that happening at Oxbridge.

Perhaps the biggest mistake of this trope is mistaking the level of intimacy in a university. Most universities are bigger than your average high school, meaning it's nearly impossible for everyone to know everyone else, and furthermore it's much easier to just avoid dealing with drama. The local Jerk Jocks aren't going to be stuffing the nerds into lockers (not that colleges have lockers outside maybe the gym, and only athletes are going to the see the inside of a locker room) without someone totally unrelated to either of them stepping in, but that's the kind of thing you might see with this trope.

A Sub-Trope of Artistic License – Education. See also California University, for the phenomenon of a cast of high schoolers all going to the same college after graduating.

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Examples:

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• An old Dell ad shows the "Dell Guy" in a college lecture hall, plugging the latest product, and eventually angering the professor. The bell soon rings and the professor has the Dell Guy stay after class to write sentences on the chalkboard, a punishment fitting elementary school more than even high school.

Films — Live-Action

• Animal House, being the Trope Codifier for Wacky Fratboy Hijinx, falls into this trap as it tries to showcase the irreverence of its characters. In doing so, it shows college professors grumbling about students not handing in papers — college professors won't grumble, they'll just give you a zero on the assignment and move on. They might grumble if you badger them for an extension, though.
• Blood Pi: The students of the college all seem to act like teenagers despite their being in college. The Omega sisters are a bunch of catty Alpha Bitches, and their boyfriends are all jocks.
• Revenge of the Nerds: Despite having all the standard college stuff like dorms and fraternities, it feels more like a high school movie in its depiction of students and how they behave. Realistically, in a college setting, the nerds should actually be pretty high up on the totem pole — college can be an incredibly nerdy place, and the high-level math and science make for a nice place to show off. It's eventually inverted in the third film, when the nerds are shown in control of the fraternity — at least until a Jerk Jock alumnus sees what's happened to it and tries to change that.
• The 2008 sex comedy College depicts college students nonstop drinking and partying, with little concern for their studies. While some colleges are certainly known for having a rowdy party atmosphere, it's definitely not the case for all of them.
• Played with in Accepted, where the college in question is a fake college for people who couldn't get into a real one. Most of the "students" have a personality disorder of some sort and behave as if college really is just like high school.
• The Waterboy, in how it depicts both the Cougars and Mud Dogs as constantly picking on Bobby for no actual reason and depicts college campuses as being unusually close-knit.
• Done nearly literally in Orange County, showing the protagonist going to college and seeing carbon-copy characters doing exactly the same things he hated about high school.
• Legally Blonde depicts law school as "High School Part 3". Elle's Limited Social Circle is confined to maybe six people, two of whom aren't even students, when each incoming Harvard Law class has around 560 students, leading to about 80 per section. In that social circle, we see every typical high school personality type (jock, bitch, princess, nerd, go-getter, you name it). When Callahan makes a pass at Elle, it's almost like a Very Special Episode of a teen show.
• I'll Be Home for Christmas may be this, though it's unclear about whether the main characters are college or prep school students. A caption refers to the institution as "Palisades College", but Allie refers to herself as an "Academy student", the students use hallway lockers to hold their belongings, and jocks still stuff the nerds, some of whom are barely past puberty, in said lockers. The actors are high school-aged, though since the original script was written to feature a 20-something lead rather than a student of any kind, most of the strangers Jake comes across treat him like a grown man rather than the teenager he is.
• In Election, Tracy Flick discovers the hard way that this is true of the college she chose, when she hoped that she would find actual peers in terms of intellect and she would be able to stop being such a stand-out Academic Alpha Bitch. She eventually accepts that it's Lonely at the Top and she will continue to climb alone.
• Candy Man focuses on grad students doing a thesis on the eponymous Candyman. The few scenes that take place at a university feature lockers, a bell, and a professor telling students it's time for lunch.
• While not shown on screen, Can't Hardly Wait averts this in its "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue. Former Big Man on Campus Trip even warns Jerk Jock Mike, who is expecting college to be a non stop orgy with girls throwing themselves at him like they would have in high school, that college is not what he expected and that he's pretty unhappy. Mike apparently fails to heed this warning and ends up losing his football scholarship due to drinking too much and can't even hold down a job at a car wash. On the opposite end of the popularity scale, nerd William becomes one of the most popular students at Harvard, starts a tech company and ends up dating a supermodel.

Literature

• Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire: Pretty much everyone on campus seems to know who Travis is and be deeply concerned with his sex life, despite him not being even a college athlete. There's rumours and gossip about exactly what his and Abby's relationship is. The characters all eat lunch together and complain about "the lunch lady".
• Discussed in Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis, where one story's narrator comments that he and his friend were wishing college were more like high school without even realizing it. One reason why is that in college, if you fall behind in a lesson, it's much harder to catch up, something many a freshman has learned the hard way.
• I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe: The students at the fictional Dupont University are part of a rigid pecking order with jocks at the top and brains at the bottom. Even the graduate students obsess over their place in these high school-style cliques.
• Elmer Gantry hints at an unbuilt version: Elmer's alma mater, Terwillinger College, is a heavily religious football school which adheres to the in loco parentis model, so it doesn't quite resemble either a high school or a modern college — but the narration mentions that it has "a standard of scholarship equal to the best high schools."

Live-Action TV

• Boy Meets World did this so religiously when its characters graduated from high school, it even went so far as to have teacher Mr. Feeny follow Cory and his friends to college.
• Family Matters continued using the "big jocks and snobby girls perpetually pick on scrawny nerd" trope when Laura, Urkel, and Eddie went off to college, though it made less sense then.
• In Saved By The Bell: The College Years, the main characters usually shared the exact same classes and still found the time to remain as close-knit as ever. Things like romantic relationships seem to be a much bigger focus for them than their studies.
• Beverly Hills, 90210 didn't know what to do when its characters graduated from high school, so it just continued almost the exact same storylines once they got to college.
• Undeclared did a pretty decent job averting many of these conventions. While the show's main characters seem unusually carefree and unambitious for college students, there's always at least a couple like that in college. The biggest oddity is probably how there are no teaching assistants to be found.
• On Friends, Ross sometimes works as a professor at NYU, ordinarily a prestigious and selective school. However, his students are usually depicted as immature dumbskulls like you'd see in high school. One episode has Ross deliver Girl Scout cookies to the dorms, whose residents call him "Cookie Dude!"
• That's My Bush!: "A Poorly Executed Plan" has George's old college buddies come over for a visit. Let alone 50-year-olds, these guys act immature even by high school standards! But then, that's probably the point.
• Played completely straight on Community, though this is likely just a byproduct of all the other weirdness on the campus. In fact, the fact that Greendale has high school-style lockers is frequently mentioned as evidence that it's a strange school.
• On Glee, the fictional New York Academy of Dramatic Arts fits the trope to the letter. We see Alpha Bitches picking on Rachel and Kurt feeling just as alienated as before. He even flat-out calls college "High School Part 2". Coupled with the extremely unrealistic admission process, it makes you wonder if anyone on the creative staff has ever been to college.

Music

• The aptly-titled "High School Never Ends" by Bowling for Soup extends this viewpoint to post-college life.

Newspaper Comics

• In Luann, Luann's father invokes this trope with regard to Luann's future in junior college. As time goes on within the strip, his prediction is proven to be 100% correct.

Theater

• Wicked: Glinda and Elphaba are in college, despite Glinda singing about the Pop U LAAAR and Fiyero being the big man on campus. If you go by the book, they were all about 17 years old when they got to Shiz, so this might be chalked up to an oversight by the adaptation.

Video Games

• Perhaps in tribute to the college sex/frat comedy genre it is pastiching, Being A ΔΙΚ treats college as, essentially, high school with adults, complete with fraternities and sororities standing in for typical high school cliques (the tri-Alphas and the tri-Betas being, essentially, the Jerk Jock and Stereotypical Nerd fraternities, respectively), hallways being packed with lockers, and teachers being way more invested in their students' grades than is typical in real life.
• The University of Grimsborough, in the Facebook hidden-object game Criminal Case: Grimsborough, contains several features one would normally associate with high schools, such as a parent-teacher association and a prom.
• Monster Prom: Implied. The setting is referred to as a high school, yet the youngest character, Miranda, is 19. The rest are in their twenties (or even older, in the case of Liam and Zoe). Miranda, Damien, Vera and her sister Valerie, and Scott and his Wolfpack cousins are also the only characters in the game who make any reference to living with their parents (or grandparents, in the wolves' case), with the first two coming specifically from high-profile royal families; and students are allowed to drink alcohol in the cafeteria, even if they're under the legal drinking age. All of this is eventually “explained” in Monster Roadtrip: monster society’s understanding of what high school is was based largely on sitcoms and the Dawson Casting was just accepted as fact.
• Discussed in Lil Gator Game when the protagonist asks their sister what college is like:
  Lil Gator: Does college really have lockers and hall monitors and big gigantic classrooms like on TV?
  Big Sis: Most of that stuff stays in high school. There are lecture halls though and they're WAAAAY too big.

Web Animation

• Beacon Academy in RWBY starts taking students of ages 17 and above (Ruby, at 15, is a Grade Skipper), holds lectures in halls, and is staffed with professors like a college, but students wear uniforms and have lockers like a high school.
• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: Episodes taking place at Omnia Academy are like this. This includes school plays, detentions, clubs and a student president election. Given that head writer Luke is a self-admitted high school dropout who never attended college, it makes some sense that his knowledge of how college works would be rather limited.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons: In "Homer Goes to College", Homer expects this to be the case. He's proven dead wrong.
• The Looney Tunes Show: In "Rebel Without a Glove", Daffy Duck ends up teaching a political science course at the local college. Bells ring to mark the start of classes, and Porky Pig acts likes a typical high school Teacher's Pet.
• An episode of Spider-Man: The New Animated Series has Peter snarking that "College is just high school with ashtrays..."
• Subverted in Daria's Grand Finale movie. Quinn's subplot has her hanging out with a college-age friend and realizing that the catty attitude she has with the Fashion Club isn't how they do things. She later mentions this while comforting Daria, telling her that she'll fit in there way better than in high school.
  • At the same time, we have Daria's final quip, tying into the show's theme that you have to deal with vain and idiotic people in all aspects of life:
  Jane: To college! I can't wait! What do you think we'll find when we get there?
  Daria: Hmm. That the students are shockingly ignorant, the professors self-centered and corrupt, and the entire system geared solely to the pursuit of funding?

Real Life

• Many American community colleges (also called junior colleges) can be effectively called "High School Part 2" and are sometimes derisively referred to as the "13th grade" (or, as Adam Carolla often puts it, "high school with ashtrays"). They often offer remedial high school-level courses in subjects like math and English to students who otherwise lack college-level academic skills, and many will offer GEDs or other high school equivalency testing for adults who never finished high school at all. This leads to a lot of structural similarities, including keeping track of attendance, the high school-like "feel" of the instruction, and the "institutional" look of campus buildings. Most community colleges are "commuter colleges" and don't have students living on campus. On the other hand, there's no dress code, no set schedule, and the instructors aren't usually as insistent on students showing up as they would be in high school; stereotypes aside, students at community college typically want to make some effort to learn something. Community colleges are also geared toward actual teaching rather than universities which are primarily set up to support research. There's also more of a vocational focus in the curriculum than in research universities.
• Many American colleges used to be like this, with things like honor codes, curfews, and mandatory attendance. Most Americans didn't even go to college until after World War II, when the GI bill gave free tuition to returning soldiers, and numbers skyrocketed. But for about 20 years, colleges were seen as caretakers of their students, partly because back then the age of majority was 21, and partly because many of those students were kids when they were sent to war, and someone needed to look out for their wellbeing. Things started to change in The '60s, when the counterculture movement took aim at how students were adults but heavily controlled by college rules, resulting in a lot of protests against "the system." Conversely, relaxing the rules gave rise to the party schools and accelerated the sorority/fraternity hijinks. You still often see honor codes among private universities, many with a religious charter, as well as armed forces academies. Even public universities enforce a limited honor code, usually against "academic dishonesty" such as cheating on exams or plagiarizing papers.
• While the difference between High School and College may vary more or less in the above way description for the students, the difference is likely to be significantly more dramatic for the instructors at most schools. Most Professors who teach are also expected to conduct research and publish material (this is where the saying "publish or perish" comes from), and in most cases the professors are expected to put a lower value on teaching than their research. Here is a good article explaining some of the significant differences that may not be apparent to anyone who hasn't entered Grad School. "The biggest difference between a university and a high school is that universities are designed to create new knowledge, while high schools are designed to disseminate existing knowledge. That means universities give you far greater autonomy and in turn expect far more from you in terms of intellectual curiosity, personal interest, and maturity."
• It's true in some sense in the British Education System, but only semantically, as "college" in Britain often implies what is effectively a form of high school. What Americans call "college" is what Britons would call "university"; what Britons call "sixth-form college", Americans would call "12th grade". There are exceptions to this, though, such as "colleges" that are institutions within a university (most notably Oxford and Cambridge, among others), further education colleges (similar to American "community colleges") that run adult education programmes, and the like. The American university system's "general education" component also looks like this in contrast to the British system, where students start on their courses toward their degree immediately. In the U.K., the closest equivalent to general education is A-Level classes in secondary school. That's why British university degrees only take three years in contrast to the four in American universities.
• A very downplayed example of this trope is prevalent in real life universities for freshmen, especially during their first semester, because adulthood sets in gradually rather than instantaneously. Many on their 18th birthday don't feel like adults (if they do, they likely did at age 17 as well) and during the freshman year (especially the first semester), there's an adjustment. Many still instinctively identify with the cliques they were a part of in high school, but this largely will be absent during their sophomore year and will most likely be entirely absent during their junior and senior years (although there are some exceptions). The classes for freshmen often have a slightly more traditional class feel while for seniors the structure may somewhat resemble a conference or meeting. That said, despite the adjustment, freshmen quickly find out that college most certainly is NOT high school and many who were used to relying on teachers pushing them when they fall behind will get a quick wake up call that the only motivator will be the bad grade itself. Professors may ask students to leave if they answer their phone in class but can't give detention or in-school suspension. Also, while student-professor romances are far less taboo than student-teacher romances, they still can land the professor in hot water with the university administration.
• At particularly small colleges, or small programs within large institutions, it's a very real possibility that all professors and students will know each other rather well.

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