YMMV / Higher Learning

• Alternate Character Interpretation: When Taryn and Kristen kiss in her dorm room, did the two actually sleep together afterward? Or was Kristen fantasizing about being with Taryn, in preparation for her having sex with her boyfriend Wayne?
• Anvilicious
  • Racism is bad and America is racist! Can't we all just get along?
  • Unlearn, which the movie literally spells out for the audience to end the film.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Most people remember the movie best for its kissing scene featuring Jennifer Connelly and Kristy Swanson.
• Cry for the Devil: "I wanted to build things! I wanted to be an engineer!"
• Ethnic Scrappy: Dr. Phipps is treated this way in-story (when some of the students mock his accent).
• Harsher in Hindsight: Remy's rampage can remind modern audiences of the Columbine shootings.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Laurence Fishburne's first line is "Welcome to the real world."
• Ho Yay: The kissing scene between Kristen and Taryn. Also their close friendship.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Some white viewers tentatively identify with Remy, arguing that his homicidal rampage in the climax was only an accounting for what had been done to him. They forget that 1) Fudge and his goons, for all their negative traits, are not bloodthirsty zealots; and 2) the two people actually shot to death by Remy are innocents who never tormented him and barely even knew him.
  • In an even more bizarre case, the actor who played the character has had to deal with black viewers telling him how much they identify and sympathize with the character.
• Narm
  • The montage alternating between Kristen and Remy decorating their dorm rooms (to two radically different styles of music) is slightly wacky.
  • That bizarre, pseudo-British accent the leader of the neo-Nazis uses.
  • Remy's Mental Breakdown and attempts to escape from the campus police.
  • The Higher Learning poem, delivered in full Beatnik fashion.
  "What is high? What is high-er? What is learn? What is learn-ing? What is higher learning?"
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Deja is shot in the stomach by Remy and suffers an agonizing death, vomiting up blood.
  • Kristen's rape. Despite not being particularly violent or graphic, it's so realistic and identical to what has played out in countless college dormitories that probably triggered some horrible memories for a lot of people.
• Rooting for the Empire: It's obvious that Singleton wants us to see the Nazi characters as evil and cruel, even to the point of having ominous music play whenever they appear. But he did a little too good a job of demonization, making every skinhead character so stupid, delusional, cowardly, or pathetic that many viewers wound up sympathizing with them anyway. This reached Epic Fail dimensions when Michael Rapaport reported hearing black moviegoers saying they identified with his character!
• Strawman Has a Point
  • John Singleton wants us to see Remy's behavior later on in the film as irrational and merely acting out. But when you take into consideration how Fudge's gang, including Malik, treat him, is there any wonder he went nuts?
  • It happens to Scott, Remy's nazi friend who urges him to stay in school. Scott does it for the wrong reasons (he thinks college learning for whites would help them go on as the master race), but still there's no denying the value of education.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The one character that isn't a jackass fed up with everything bad going on or looking for solutions in the absolute worst places is the Wide-Eyed Idealist girl that gets shot by Remy at the climax. And Malik, The Hero, runs away and drops out of college. So, yeah.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Even if you can ignore the hairstyles of the male characters, which by themselves date this film, there is also the heavily closeted lesbian relationship - not to mention the (literally) black-and-white racial politics and general exaggeration and cartoonishness, which will have "poor man's Spike Lee" spilling from your mouth within seconds.

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