One thing I always liked growing up is watching shows about characters in school. A lot of them were set in elementary school (ex: "The Fairly OddParents"), some were in middle school (ex:"Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide"), but a grand majority of them seemed to be set in high school. You name it, "That's So Raven", "Danny Phantom", and "Kim Possible" it seemed like the go to setting for a work of fiction was a high school. Heck, even movies loved that setting. Of course you have stuff like "High School Musical" and "West Side Story". Not to mention both cinematic Spider-Man reboots put Peter Parker back in high school. But as I began my college years I began to notice something, you really don't see that many works of fiction set in college as opposed to high school, where it seems that we get endless amounts. So that brings us to today's question, just why is college a less popular fictional setting than college? And what can be done to make college just as appealing as a setting as high school?
Well to me personally I believe it could be few major factors. And keep in mind that this is all my opinion on the matter, so with that said let's look at factor one.
Relatability
Whenever people write a work of fiction, one goal they almost always want is to make their characters as relatable to the audience as possible. This is why a lot of protagonists for shows and movies aimed at younger audiences are often children because it's easy to get sucked into a world when it's through the eyes of a character that looks like you. But why are teenagers often the protagonist of something? Well it's because being a teen along with the entire high school experience is a big transitional period in peoples lives. Your teenage years are the bridge between childhood and adulthood, it's a time where yeah you're still a minor but you're also starting get a taste of what independence is like such as getting your first job or learning how to drive.
I also think a big part of high school constantly showing up in fiction is nostalgia. This is because high school is one of the last universal experiences people have before adulthood. True, not everyone finishes high school but everyone has attended it. So by having something set in high school you not only grab an audience of teens that can instantly see themselves in the setting but you also can grab an audience of adults that can be reminded of that stage in their life.
And this is why I believe we don't see undergrad that much as a setting. The simple fact of the matter is that not everyone attends college after high school, so I think that with a lot of creative teams is there's this fear that you might lose out on the relatability factor if college is the setting. Especially if a character people follow starts off in high school. But I also think there's another factor to this.
The Classic School Tropes
Audiences like to see drama in their entertainment and there are few people on earth more dramatic than teenagers. Whether it's crushes, exams, or thinking about the future there are a lot of things that teens both real and fictional have to traverse through in their daily lives. I also think seeing drama that pertains to the teenage years also plays into another factor on why high school is used more than college in fiction, and that is familiarity.
By now we all now the standard stories that come with the high school setting. For instance, you have stories of the social hierarchy in high school (popular and unpopular kids), getting ready for prom or preparing for a big game. True everyone has been through these kind of things before, but seeing different kinds of characters approach these situations is what keeps them fresh. But familiarity is often what makes writers be unwilling to change things up should they have a character grow up and go a college. Believe it or not there are some works with undergrad as the setting that treat college as just another high school.
For instance, the strict principal will become the strict dean. The teacher dealing with unruly students will become the professor. And the bullies will become the fraternities and sororities. And I won't lie, it kinda drives me crazy when writers just write college as another part of high school. So with that said, what ways can we differentiate college from high school as a setting? And this is where we get to the fun part.
Writing The College Experience
Now of course, everybody's college experience is going to be different. Especially depending on the kind of school one goes too. There's the PWI's (ex: Georgia Southern), the HBCU's (ex: Tuskegee), the Ivy League schools (ex: Yale), and much more. So with that said college isn't going to be the universal experience that high school usually is and therefore it can be challenging to come up with scenarios for your characters that you could easily think of in a high school setting. But I think that with all the different kinds of colleges and universities there are, it can make writers have a diverse range on what college stories they can come up with. Especially if the writer is writing what they know based on their own college experience.
Now let's start off with one way we can properly handle an old high school trope in college, and that is the social groups. Now speaking from experience, I can say with full confidence that there are still cliques in college but unlike high school there's no longer a social hierarchy. As stated before these are the classic popular and unpopular kids. Since there's a much larger student body there's going to be much less intimacy than there was in high school. Not everyone is going to know one another and that's when it starts to click to students that the only reason they seemed to have a lot of friends in their teenage years is because they saw them five days a week. In college you never have to worry which table you're supposed to sit at during lunch and you can openly love nerdy stuff. It certainly helps that nerd culture has become mainstream in the past decade.
Now if you're thinking, "well dang, how can I create meaningful stakes and drama in a story in college if everyone gets along?" Well just because it's easier to avoid drama in college doesn't mean you'll be completely free from it. Now that you have to mature characters from their teenage conflicts you have to come up with problems that are natural to the college environment. One such conflict is the fear of falling behind. A common plot thread in high school stories is a character finding something they're good at, but often people who were at the top of their game in high school get to college and discover that they're being heavily outpaced by their peers. This can be a great way for a character to figure out their place in the world, especially if it's a character that prides themself of being the best.
Another reason why college can be a great setting is that it can allow writers to have characters explore who they are in a way that's actually age appropriate. By age appropriate I mean mature subject matters such as drugs and sex. I've seen my fair share of criticisms lobbied at shows and films that showcase subjects such as these because it's mad uncomfortable seeing them presented through characters that are minors. But by having the setting be college, you can bypass these criticisms since all the characters are young adults. While it's true that your high school years is when you begin to discover who you are, college is an even greater time for that since you're no longer under your parents roof. Plus the college setting allows characters to have greater forms of self expression that they wouldn't have at home.
And that's not even getting into how your characters social life can be explored through the various greek organizations on campus (Ex: IFC, PHA, NPHC, and MGC) or if they plan on going pro if they play sports. The possibilities are endless!
Conclusion
There's a plethora of potential that's yet to be realized with using college as a setting. Now don't get it twisted there are plenty of works that are set in college such as "Stomp The Yard", "Monsters University", and more recently "Blood At The Root" by Ladarrion Williams. But compared to the amount that are set in high school? Not even close. And in my eyes, that seriously needs to change. Hopefully in the future more creatives can tell memorable stories using this setting. And who knows? Maybe that creative could be one of y'all reading this right now.
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