| Director | Steve Pink |
|---|---|
| Budget | $23 million |
| Box office | $38.6 million |
Bartleby Gaines is a strongly persuasive high school senior in Wickliffe, Ohio. His gifts do not extend to his grades, however, and Bartleby receives rejection letters from all the colleges to which he applies, including those with high acceptance rates.
To gain approval from his demanding father, Bartleby creates a fake college, the South Harmon Institute of Technology (S.H.I.T.), and is joined by Rory Thayer, who only applied to Yale University and was rejected due to legacy preferences; Darryl "Hands" Holloway, who lost his athletic scholarship after an injury; and Glen, an outcast who received a 0 on his SAT due to not signing his name.
To make the "college" seem legitimate to his father, Bartleby convinces his best friend, Sherman Schrader III, who has been accepted into his father's prestigious alma mater, Harmon College, to aid him by building a website. The two also hire Sherman's cynical uncle and a former philosophy professor at Harmon College, Dr. Ben Lewis, to pose as Dean. They then lease an abandoned psychiatric hospital near Harmon College and renovate it superficially to give the appearance of a college campus. Their plan initially succeeds in fooling Bartleby's parents, but backfires when the website automatically enrolls other applicants.
Out of empathy, Bartleby lets them believe the school is real and that they will finally be accepted, despite objections from his friends. After a visit to Harmon disenchants him with traditional college life, he decides to let the students create their own curriculum. This ranges from traditional topics of study like culinary arts and woodcarving to more unusual courses such as meditation, skateboarding, and even psychokinesis.
As the college is further developed, Bartleby starts a school newspaper, a clothing line, and a mascot, while Dean Lewis gives brutally honest lectures about life that draw large crowds; the students of South Harmon spend most of their time partying.
Meanwhile, Richard Van Horne, the narcissistic Dean of Harmon College, plans to tear down old and unused buildings on and near campus to construct a park-like walkway similar to Yale's and Harvard's, hoping to make Harmon look more prestigious. Van Horne dispatches Harmon's student body president Hoyt Ambrose to buy up the nearby properties, but Bartleby refuses to relinquish his lease, becoming an obstacle to Van Horne's ambitions.
The dispute turns personal when Monica Moreland, a girl Bartleby has been vying for the affections of since high school, breaks up with Hoyt after catching him with another woman. She begins frequently visiting Bartleby at South Harmon, eventually deciding to transfer and start a relationship with him.
Meanwhile, Schrader is attempting to join Hoyt's fraternity as a legacy but is constantly humiliated and abused by its members. After discovering Sherman at a South Harmon party, the fraternity forcibly coerces him into revealing South Harmon as a sham. Hoyt uses the information to contact all the students' parents, and Van Horne exposes South Harmon as a fake institution. The school is forced to close, and Bartleby is at risk of prison time for fraud. Sherman, who directly experienced much of Harmon College's abuses, files with Ohio's State Board of Education for accreditation, giving Bartleby a chance to make South Harmon a legitimate college.
At the subsequent hearing, Bartleby's attempts to meet the board's standards for accreditation frequently fall flat and prove their unconventional curriculum and student services to be lacking. Believing himself to be doomed, Bartleby makes an impassioned speech about the failures of conventional education and the importance of seeking knowledge and personal growth through following one's own passions. This convinces the board to grant the school a one-year probationary accreditation, testing Bartleby's system and providing an opportunity to legitimize the institution.
Following extensive campus renovations, the college reopens with an expanded student body that includes Sherman and Monica. Subsequently, students and new credentialed instructors join the faculty to support the curriculum under Ben's leadership, and Bartleby ultimately earns his father's pride in his education and management efforts. In the film's final scene, Van Horne's car spontaneously explodes due to an eccentric student having learned psychokinesis.