Academy of Evil

"And tomorrow, we'll be learning about 'DEF': Destruction, Extortion and French Accents."

"I didn't spend six years in evil medical school to be called 'mister', thank you very much."

— Dr. Evil, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

This is a school that teaches their students how to be better villains. There will be courses on mayhem, extortion, use of powers for evil, money laundering and many other topics. Usually the school will be a strictly evil institution that is staffed entirely with Sadist Teachers and directed by the Principal / Big Bad. Despite this rigid order much of the rules have two big caveats: Might Makes Right, and the teachers won't punish cheating — rather, they'll punish getting caught because it's a sign of sloppy work.

Presumably, such a school is funded by graduates tithing back money to the principal, though he or she may get funding from parents who enroll their children because they want their kids to follow their evil jackboot-steps. Then again, the school may act as a talent agency / crime ring and hire out students as mercenaries, or use them to commit crimes.

To be fair, Dark Is Not Evil, and the Academy Of Evil may just be suffering from a bad reputation. In this case it will at worst be teaching the Off-Grey Arts and fomenting ambition and guile in the student body. Speaking of which, expect it to have a near Darwinian social scene that makes most prisons seem like a Sugar Bowl. The Alpha Bitch won't just badmouth you, she'll have her Girl Posse cut you up and sell you for parts to the Mad Scientist-in-training.

If there is a good-aligned Wizarding School, Ninja School, or Superhero School, expect them both to be rivals. May overlap with All-Ghouls School, although they're more likely to be Dark Is Not Evil. This will most likely be where villains get their Morally Ambiguous Doctorates. See also Thug Dojo for a martial arts school that trains its students to be amoral Might Makes Right type villains.Most often it is a subtrope to Boarding School of Horrors only differing from other subtropes in that it openly advertises and promotes its immoral teachings while a lot of other boarding schools of no lesser horrors keep up a facade of respectability and decency. Also, a lot people who are there at least feel at home and it is of no horror to them.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The eponymous institution in Hollow Fields is a school for mad scientists, with courses in graverobbing, building machines of destruction, and so forth.
• Duel Academia from Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V trains its students to become Child Soldiers who partake in genocide for fun and act as a personal army for Professor Leo Akaba.

Asian Animation

• In Happy Heroes, the monsters have a school where they learn how to be proper monsters. There always seems to be a lack of funding, though...

Comic Books

• Alan Moore did a 2000 AD gag strip based on one of these for Ming-style Space Opera bad guys.
• Batman:
  • The situation in Arkham Asylum is so dire that at times Batman's veteran rogues decided to teach the less experienced inmates the in-and-outs of their trades For the Evulz, effectively turning the place into an impromptu school for evildoers. Founder Jeremiah Arkham himself described it as "The Ivy League of Insanity". During her Start of Darkness, Batgirl's enemy Knightfall went so far as to get herself committed to Arkham on purpose so she could learn how to be a supervillain and D-lister Condiment King is said to have upped his game after Poison Ivy taught him about how to turn plants used in condiments into poisons.
  • St. Hadrian's Finishing School for Girls in Batman Incorporated, which is run by the international Terrorists Without a Cause group Leviathan and trains its pupils to become spies, assassins and depraved seducers. After Batman and an undercover Stephanie Brown took it out, it was restarted by Spyral, and trained its pupils to become spies, assassins, and depraved seducers for good causes, under the new headmistress Kathy Kane (the Silver Age Batwoman, recently retconned back into continuity).
• In Black Hood Comics #9, criminal mastermind Markov starts a school for (adult) criminals, teaching them how to fight barehanded, how to evade police capture, etc. He does so out of a simple desire to improve the local criminal landscape, having found the crooks he'd met up to that point clumsy and stupid.
• In Deadly Class, students are the sons and daughters of fine important figures such as KGB/CIA/FBI agents, gangbangers, neo-Nazis, African warlords, and South American drug cartels, just to name a few.
• Judge Dredd: The Dark Judges are shown to have taken over their version of the Academy of Law during the destruction of their planet to teach the trainees how to best execute citizens.
• Oft mentioned in Justice League International is the Manga Khan School of Melodrama, which teaches students how to talk like a villain.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Any institution run by Taskmaster is this — he first came to prominence running schools for henchmen of other supervillains. Later, during Dark Reign, he was in charge of the Initiative for a while. He's so good at what he does that the government sometimes hires him to train their operatives, including a replacement Captain America.
  • Xavier's School for Exceptionally Wayward Youth in X-Men Noir is a reform school... but Professor X teaches his students how to be better criminals rather than actually reforming them. He insists this is a ploy to gain their trust so they will gradually open up to him and therapy can begin in earnest. In reality, he is developing and studying them to prove his theory that sociopathy is the next stage of human behavioral evolution.
  • X-Men:
    • Emma Frost a.k.a. the White Queen used to be headmistress of the Massachusetts Academy — a front for the Hellfire Club that produced the Hellions, rivals to the then-Xavier Institute student body, the New Mutants. When Emma had her Heel–Face Turn, the Massachusetts Academy became a Superhero School, the front for Generation X.
    • In New X-Men: Academy X, the Hellions are another "house" within the Xavier Institute, but still kind of villain-y and rivals to the New Mutants team.
    • The Hellfire Academy in Wolverine and the X-Men (Marvel Comics) is kind of like the Massachusetts Academy only completely insane.
• Star Wars: Doctor Aphra: During the And the Enormous Profit arc, Aphra ultimately sells the Rur crystal to the "Shadow University". Though they are not shown doing anything particularly evil, the fact that they were included on the attendance list to Aphra's Auction of Evil and the fact that the morally grey Aphra says she admires them imply that they are this. They also threaten to expose Aphra's cheating and get her doctorate revoked again if she does not sell the Rur crystal to them. The Shadow University returns during the Fortune and Fate arc, in which we learn that they really do operate like a normal school (complete with peer-reviewed dissertations), and where it's reiterated that they have no problem buying clearly stolen artifacts from people like Aphra.

Fan Works

• The Victors Project:
  • The Career tribute schools in District One (District Academy for Excellence in Youth Development or simply DAEYD) and Two (the Institute a.k.a. Murder High) teach children to kill other children in the name of money and honor, and those children have an unfair advantage over the other district children.
  • Downplayed with the training camps in District Four, as the tributes who train there do so in case they're reaped or someone who is sick/disabled is reaped (so they can volunteer for them). They're also observed to not be as Ax-Crazy compared to One and Two.

Films — Animated

• The school seen in the Cannon Fodder segment of Memories seems to only teach material applicable to designing, building, and launching bombs. The whole city is in a Forever War against an enemy who might not even exist, so this is the totalitarian government's way of cementing their control over the next generation. Of course, the kids (and possibly the teachers) don't consider it evil, since they've never known anything else.

Films — Live-Action

• From the Austin Powers movies: Dr. Evil did not spend six years at Evil Medical School to be called "Mister", thank you very much.
• The Karate Kid: Cobra Kai is essentially a Dojo of Evil.
• The eponymous school in the 1960 film School for Scoundrels teaches how to be a nasty manipulative person, but without ever breaking any rules, because rule-breakers risk being caught. Based on a series of spoof self-help books.
• Royal Pain plans to turn Sky High (2005) into one of these, turning the students, faculty and alumni into babies and then raising them anew as supervillains. Even before that, the school already has villains, as evidenced by Speed and Lash.
• The titular school in St. Trinian's is more an academy of anarchy, but there are classes in various forms of lucrative crime and how to avoid arrest in foreign countries. The students and teachers do seem to be chaotic neutral rather than actually evil.

Folklore

• The Scholomance, from Romanian mythology, is a hidden school underneath Transylvania with Satan for a headmaster. Students here learn The Dark Arts, including the power to control the weather, but the Devil then keeps one of the students as the class's 'tuition' before releasing the others.

Literature

• Discworld: Played with with the Assassins' Guild School; while it does still teach the art of assassination, is also considered a prestigious academy for gentlemen and, as of recently, ladies. Another Academy of Evil is discussed in Sourcery, though it may not actually exist:
  Of course, all Grand Viziers talk like that all the time. There's probably a school somewhere.
• Doom Valley Prep School: The titular school is a well-respected institution and ranked #2 in the world for creating first-rate evil overlords, dark wizards, warlords, politicians, assassins, lawyers, and other careers that involve grabbing the world by the throat and taking what you want. It doesn't just teach students to be evil, it teaches them how to be successful at whatever they do. And they'll make sure students learn or die trying.
• Dracula: Dracula is mentioned to have studied at the "Scholomance" — presumably the same one from the Folklore section above. Freda Warrington's unofficial sequel has the now-abandoned Scholomance play a big role in the plot.
• The Circle (2011): The witches are told straight out that their school is a place of evil, and much of the bad stuff in the novel happens there.
• Ender's Game: Battle School is on the very dark side of morally ambiguous. On the one hand, they're training commanders to attack an alien race that once attacked them. On the other hand they plan the complete genocide of the aliens and consider students killing one another an acceptable part of their training. The eventual sequels cast Battle School in a different light, showing that while it's quite deliberately teaching "evil values" to many of the students, it's doing so for their weaknesses: the institution was founded to deal with far more important and long-term problems than an unfortunate kerfuffle with an alien race, and a number of its students were destined even before their enrollment to become problems. Battle School is actually finishing them to look really good to their sponsors upon graduation... and then fail miserably (and in the meantime, using them to help finish the other students in other directions).
• The Evil Genius Trilogy sends its protagonist, the Sociopathic Hero Cadel, to the Axis Institute, which includes courses like "Poisoning" and "Forgery". This is probably one of the most deconstructive uses of this trope in literature; the institution was founded despite violating in-universe suspension of disbelief of its founders that the concept was workable either as an ideal for education or a for-profit business, and it mostly exists by virtue of being invoked by an in-setting narrative expecting it to exist. It also directly conflicts with an arguable message of the series as a whole: that social systems intended for good, even while corrupt, employed by the negligent and uncaring, and actively exploited by the evil, still tend to end up providing people with better lives than they could seize for themselves through selfish acts.
• Forgotten Realms: The dark elven city of Menzoberranzan has one, most elaborated on in R. A. Salvatore's The Legend of Drizzt novels (but also appearing in Elaine Cunningham's Liriel novels and the War of the Spider Queen series). Tier-Breche (usually simply called "The Academy") is divided into three sub-schools, Melee-Magthere (for warriors), Sorcere (for wizards) and Arach-Tinillith (for the clergy of Lolth). Considering its two functions are to train the students to lethal efficiency in their particular discipline and firmly induct them into a Religion of Evil, it's a very scary place. Since the main hero Drizzt is a warrior, his education mostly takes place in Melee-Magthere — and it's ripe with backstabbing, Klingon Promotion and things like using children to bait monsters for students to practice on. And yet Drizzt's mentor Zaknafein adamantly insists that he goes there, because apparently Sorcere is even worse.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, it's noted that Durmstrang, the Eastern European school, has the reputation as this among the eleven great Wizarding schools of the world. Even though they don't accept muggleborns and teach Dark Arts, it's downplayed. They have one particularly infamous former pupil, Dumbledore's old "friend"/arch-nemesis Gellert Grindelwald, but they had to draw the line and expel him when he crossed a line, whereas a school that really played this trope straight would probably have nurtured him. We do meet Durmstrang alumni who are definitely not evil and take a hard stand against evil (Viktor Krum comes to mind right away) and this isn't shown as being very odd. It's also noted in some supplemental information that the school has gone through a bit of a renaissance after trying to rehabilitate after the fall of Voldemort.
  • Slytherin House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has this reputation; nearly all of the Death Eaters came from Slytherin. It basically becomes a grooming platform for future Death Eaters once Voldemort comes to power.
  • When Hogwarts is taken over by the corrupt Ministry of Magic in Deathly Hallows, it is bent to Voldemort's will. Students are taught the Dark Arts, Muggle Studies is made compulsory and taught with a bias against Muggles, and corporal punishment is put into use. It doesn't work on the students except for Slytherin House. However, all of this stops after Voldemort is killed and the Second Wizarding War ends.
• The House of Reform in The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School, rivals to the eponymous Extranormal Institute, and described as "a whole school of Wrong 'Uns. Lobelia Draycott probably gave out end of term prizes for the most inventive crimes."
• The eponymous Higher Institute of Villainous Education in the H.I.V.E. Series. This is very nearly dueling with the Evil Genius Trilogy above. Whereas the Axis Institute will sacrifice nearly any amount of practicality for the sake of more evil, the H.I.V.E. is dedicated primarily to the personal empowerment of its students and their natural talents, and secondarily to the survival of supervillainy as a lifestyle choice. This means But Not Too Evil: ensuring its graduates are happy also means ensuring they know when to stop for their own benefit, and the institution and its better students actually seem to get into Evil vs. Evil situations more than the heroes of the setting. (Basically, the philosophical difference is that H.I.V.E. believes in getting more for yourself in absolute terms, and looks down on the kind of villainy that values "having it all" more — self-elevation versus forcing the world to rest of the world to lie down so you can still see over their heads.)
• The Luciferian Academy in The Jeremiah School is one where its students are taught how to dabble in "the unholy arts" that the Bible warns God's people against. Its headmaster is Lucien Morgenstern, who is responsible for killing Peter Stone's parents, and three of its students (two wizards and a witch) are evil expies of Harry, Ron, and Hermione from Harry Potter.
• Lawless Academy in Lawless is a school for criminals.
• In Rogue Sorcerer, the Tower is an academy for Sorcerers who use blood magic to control murderous demons.
• Naturally, The School for Good and Evil focuses on a school that lives up to this and to Hero Academy. At the end of the series the main characters resolve to keep the school running to preserve the Balance Between Good and Evil that the previous schoolmasters had thrown off.
• In The Screwtape Letters, it's mentioned that Hell has a Training College for young devils, run by a demon named Slubgob. They study such courses as sexual temptation ("a subject of considerable tedium", complains Screwtape) and disguising oneself as an Angel of Light.
• There is a "Shadow Academy" in Star Wars Legends, as a Dark Side counterpart to the Jedi Academy.
• The Wheel of Time has Mesaana opening a lot of those during the Age of Legends, and its pupils were not dedicated to idle cackling.
• The Witch of Knightcharm features the mythical Scholomance, which as usual is depicted as an underground school where magicians learn to cast evil spells. The protagonist is a good witch who infiltrates the school in order to redeem herself for having been beaten by its pupils earlier, but after she finds out that she's unable to leave, she's forced to find a way to survive the inhuman lessons (and murderous classmates) and to progress through the curriculum without being corrupted by the evil all around her.

Live-Action TV

• Alex Rider (2020): Malagosto, Scorpia's training centre for assassins, where "classes" include hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, and infiltration planning. This is actually played straighter than it was in Scorpia, with all students being orphaned Tyke Bombs in their mid twenties at most, rather than experienced former special forces personnel, with Alex's age being an outlier, as was the case in the books.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: A Season 5 episode reveals that HYDRA operated at least one secret facility that served as a boarding school for children born into the organization. It's shown that Brigadier General Hale, Wolfgang Von Strucker, and Jasper Sitwell were all students there in the same class.
• There are two that show up in Charmed (1998), both called simply the Academy. They focus on turning humans into demons.
• The Armed Brain Army Volt in Choujuu Sentai Liveman are a cult of super-geniuses who entice promising university students into joining with the offer of obtaining more knowledge. Granted, there isn't anything inherently evil about most of the super-science they teach (and it's pointed out several times that if they really wanted to, the students/executives of Volt could use their research to better the world instead), but the students of Volt are actively encouraged to give up their humanity in the pursuit of more knowledge.
• Odd Squad: The Season 3 episode "Mr. Unpredictable" introduces Villain University, which is a school where potential villains go to learn about villainy. Orla and Oswald go undercover as villains in order to find out more about the titular villain, who attended Villain University.
• The Outer Limits (1995): The episode "Straight and Narrow" features a school where students are implanted with a mind control chip. One of the classes features assassination as a viable business practice for getting rid of the competition.
• The Thundermans: Max Thunderman wants to go to one of these, but the premise of the show is him keeping up the Masquerade in a suburban public school.

Roleplay

• The play-by-post roleplay Destine Enormity has SIN Academy, where the city's overlords indoctrinate the city's children.
• In the quest Warhammer Fantasy Divided Loyalties, a Necrarch vampire has set up a "College of Necromancy" in Sylvania, complete with students wearing Black robes to ape the colored robes of the Colleges of Magic. Proof of this college is all that's needed to convince the Emperor and Supreme Patriarch to unleash the Empire’s Battle Wizards on Sylvania.

Tabletop Games

• The Bleak Academy in Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine exists beyond the edge of the world; many of the darker characters have studied there.
• In Dungeons & Dragons, devils are Lawful Evil outsiders created from mortal soul shells, in a gruesome process that strips the damned soul of its memories and original personality. To help them (re)learn how to infiltrate and manipulate mortal society, promising devils are sent to Offalion, an academy of sorts on Baator's squalid layer of Maladomini. Here, senior baatezu put together half-ruined mock-ups of Material Plane locales like marketplaces, temples and palaces, to run intricate scenarios and simulations that prepare devils for upcoming missions. Success means a devil can be sent off on assignment to continue climbing Hell's hierarchy, while failure may lead devils to be demoted into a lower form of baatezu. Sometimes mortals are conscripted to take part in the scenarios as advisors or even wild cards, and those who do so have a chance to learn about the devils' plans for the Material Plane.
  • In Volo's Guide to Monsters, it's mentioned that the Lawful Evil Hobgoblins have their own Wizarding School, despite previous editions having them eschew magic entirely as weak or "elf-like". Being a Proud Warrior Race though, the aptly named Academy of Devastation focuses entirely on evocation magic to serve in warfare.
  • In Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Level Nine is Dweomercore, the academy started by Halaster to train up potential new apprentices. Players have to contend with the other students jockeying for Halaster's favor, and can potentially disrupt everything by taking out the headmaster an arcanolith posing as Halaster, or devote themselves to spreading dissent among the student body before descending to the next level of Undermountain.
• Mutants & Masterminds: In response to the heroic Claremont Academy of Freedom City, the villain Taurus launched the villainous equivalent: the Shadow Academy. 3rd Edition adds the Elysium Academy in Sunset Hill, in the West Coast setting of Emerald City; publicly, Elysium is a boarding school for the children of Sunset Hill's residents,who were denied entry into the exclusive Malory College. Privately, it's the West Coast extension of the Shadow Academy (the residents of Sunset Hill are retired supervillains, after all; when Taurus reached out with an offer to expand the Shadow Academy, the local baddies jumped at the chance to stick it to Malory College).

Video Games

• Bloodborne:
  • While Byrgenwerth College started out as a regular college of some type, one day they discovered the hidden Pthumerian Tombs below the city of Yharnam. It was their decision to crack open the "Tomb of the Gods" that inadvertently started the city's descent into madness, and it was a demented former student that started the blood craze (leading to the Vilebloods). The evil part comes in when it's revealed in The Old Hunters DLC that Byrgenwerth sent Hunters and students to sack a fishing village that was home to a local Eldritch Abomination and apparently killed everyone there. Eventually, they split into several factions, the largest of which being the Healing Church. Their decision to keep investigating alternate ways of understanding the Pthumerians' mastery of magic aside from Old Blood (the Fishing Hamlet massacre, research on Insight) brought them into conflict with the Healing Church, and spelled doom for everyone involved. In the modern day, Byrgenwerth is abandoned aside from the dead and the insane. The implication is that most students went their separate ways once the Healing Church started to take off.
  • The School of Mensis is a heretical offshoot of the Healing Church, which as previously mentioned splintered from Byrgenwerth. It is, bar none, the most malevolent faction of the game, having no issue with kidnapping people to serve as fodder for their rituals. Their land has been twisted into an expanse of mountains bearing countless screaming faces, rising above a sea of fog. Their headquarters serve as a prison for an Eldritch Abomination and an incubator for another.
• Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin: The Dark Academy certainly appears to be this kind of place, being a perpetually gloomy and rainy schoolhouse crawling with poltergeists and demons that features ghastly phenomena like bloody hand prints that follow you along the wall as you pass through a room. You never get to see the place teaching anything, but as it features witches and mandragoras as enemies and "The Creature" as the level boss, it's safe to assume witchcraft and mad science are on the curriculum.
• Choice of Games offers Grand Academy for Future Villains, in which you're attending the school that teachers evil masterminds and would-be despots, and is aware of the genres they're being sent to.
• The Academy of Evil, from Crash Twinsanity, a private school that literally teaches students to be evil, for the sake of being evil. The series' antagonist, Dr. Neo Cortex, studied here, while his niece was thrown out and had to continue her studies at the Evil Public School which is visited in Crash: Mind Over Mutant.
• The Institute of Evil, Nether Academy, is the setting of Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice. It's literally a school in hell, where demons go to learn how to be properly evil (by their generally awkward standards). Since Disgaea demons run on Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad, the students they consider honor students are the ones who never attend class or do their homework, while the delinquents are the ones who maintain 100% attendance (even though the teachers rarely bother showing up), and give themselves homework (which they always complete) since the teachers won't. They also pick up litter. Oddly, the so-called "delinquents" are the only ones who ever get to graduate from the academy, since they run off the same standards as any other school in that regard... In fact, the previously mentioned delinquents are the first ones to ever graduate, which amounts to be Kicked Upstairs. You see, the Academy's objective is to make the students remain paying the tuition for all eternity. The Updated Re-release Absence of Detention introduces a rival school, Majin Institute, which is dedicated to training students to become Majins (one of the strongest type of Demon in the Disgaea universe). It's a Sucky School that has yet to produce a single Majin and currently only has seven students total who are nowhere close to Majins.
• The Sith Academies on Korriban and Malachor V in Knights of the Old Republic and The Sith Lords, respectively. The former encourages backstabbing and killing your fellow students and even teachers to gnaw your way to the top. The Korriban academy has been rebuilt and reestablished by the time of Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's not notably less evil than it used to be, as Sith Warrior and Inquisitor player characters can attest. For starters, it's possible (even encouraged) for each of them to be the Sole Survivor of their training cadre.
• Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake: Big Boss runs a child soldier military, outright declaring his pride in creating a cycle of retaliation and death that will ensure the darkest parts of war survive to the modern ages. But given the sheer level of his charisma and military prowess in building his PMC, and the capabilities of his archrivals, it's implied that he was training up the next generation of Millitaries Sans Frontieres, an international infiltration and shock trooper army, to harass and terrorize the world whenever it got complacent enough to send good soldiers into the meat grinder for fun and profit, or when secret organizations attempt to enslave the world again.
• The Edgewood Home for Lost Children in Our Darker Purpose is a twisted school where the use of arcane demonic rituals and plain physical violence between students are supported by the Administrator, while acts of kindness (like saving still-living critters from the Cafeteria) are frowned upon and ridiculed... as well as punished.
• Resident Evil 0: The Umbrella Management Training Facility is what it sounds like: an ornate, mansion-like university of sorts owned by Umbrella to train prospective employees, managers and scientists for future employment, as well as instill within its students fanatical loyalty to the company. Said education does indeed involve Umbrella's signature unethical experiments with viruses among others. Additionally, it's situated in the Arklay Mountains of Raccoon City, not far from Umbrella's main Arklay Laboratory. And yes, there is a hidden lab underneath the facility as well, run by a mad scientist (James Marcus) to boot, and to give you an idea of what kind of madmen this place churned out, series supervillain Albert Wesker got his start here alongside G-Virus creator William Birkin, to say nothing of James Marcus using the students as guinea pigs in his twisted experiments. Pretty much the only nice thing to be said about the place is they'll take anyone regardless of race, gender, or creed, according to a file found in the ruins of the joint. The school was shut down at some point, and when plans to reopen it were made, they were just as soon scrapped by both the resurrected James Marcus going on a rampage and unleashing the T-Virus in it, and when Birkin set off the facility's self-destruct system, destroying it.
• World of Warcraft: Scholomance is a school for necromancy that trains aspiring cultists and minions of the Scourge.

Webcomics

• The defunct webcomic Mad About U was set in a university for mad scientists.
• In Nodwick, the evil wizard Ildomir went to a school for wizards called the Heractium Dark Arts Academy.

Web Original

• Silas University in Carmilla the Series is an evil university, as described in its student handbook. Which at Door Stopper length (700 pages), Laura Hollis failed to read.
• In the world of Nocte Yin, there are Evil Academy and Hero Academy, as well as their rival schools.
• In Twig, an academic organization known simply as "The Academy" is the scientific force behind an empire spanning a full third of the known world, with a specialization in biological modification. Weapons projects are first in line for funding, students are subtly encouraged to backstab and sabotage each other, and the Academy has anyone who they suspect knows Academy science when they shouldn't assassinated.
• Naturally, the Whateley Universe has one: the deVille Academy, a world-class education establishment where the meanest, nastiest, and sneakiest street urchins and gutter rats whom the proprietors can find get turned into master thieves, spies, torturers, and assassins. They have a rivalry with both Yama Dojo and the titular Superhero School Whateley Academy, but are much less pleasant about it than the Devil Dojo are — they tend to see the ninjas as insular and outdated, while they view the Whateley students as overblown buffoons who would be lost without their powers (with a fair amount of justification in both cases). However, their love of their own sneakiness leads to one of the training mission teams, who up to then had been leading everyone else around in circles, being outwitted themselves by Insufferable Genius Jobe Wilkins.

Western Animation

• The Huntsclan Academy in American Dragon: Jake Long, where students are taught how to slay dragons and to be overall racist Knight Templars.
• Carmen Sandiego has V.I.L.E. Academy, where said villainous organization trains new generations of super-criminals. The title character was a student there, having been raised there from infancy, but escaped and went rogue after realizing that they were the bad guys.
• The Cool McCool episode "College of Crooks" has such a school, consisting of McCool's regular roster of villains (the Owl, the Rattler, Hurricane Harry, Jack-in-the-Box, Dr. Madcap and Greta Ghoul). Their initial assignment is to get rid of McCool.
• An episode of Dog City has mob boss Bugsy attempt to turn a regular school into this.
• Earthworm Jim feature a humorous advertisement for a school for villains, showing a teacher pointing at the black board and reading, "Ah... ha... ha... ha... ha..."
• One episode of Inspector Gadget has the titular character shutting down the M.A.D. Acedemy, which is one of these. Then, in the 2015 version, we have Evil U, which is also one of these.
• Phineas and Ferb: Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz intends to open one in "Swiss Family Phineas". He tries to drive laundromats bankrupt so he can turn them into school buildings.
• The Simpsons: Downplayed in the episode "Homie the Clown", in which The Mafia takes over Krusty's Clown School and the new instructors encourage students to commit crimes.
  Mafia Goon: Kids these days have a lot of money, so after you perform, you might consider robbing 'em!
• Hexley Hall in Sofia the First is shown to have rather naughty students that pick on any non-wizards.
• Sonic Boom:
  • "Eggheads" involved Eggman running an impromptu version of this after brainwashing Sonic's friends into evil geniuses like himself.
  • "Mister Eggman" revolves around Eggman running to college to get his degree in Evil Science after learning he failed to get the last two credits required.
• In Teen Titans (2003), there is the H.I.V.E. (not this one), which originally trains super-villains to work as mercenaries, its star pupils being Jinx, Gizmo, and Mammoth, used by Slade in a very early episode. Later, in the third season, the school plays a much bigger part of the plot, with Brother Blood as the Big Bad of the storyline and headmaster of the school. It's really not all that different from a regular high school (there's a Sadie Hawkins dance, regular lunchroom, etc.) — the only thing different is the subject matter. After Blood's defeat, the school is defunct, but Jinx, Gizmo, and Mammoth form a team called the H.I.V.E. Five, which eventually gets six members and joins the Brain's Brotherhood of Evil.
• Perfecto Prep from Tiny Toon Adventures is the rival school of ACME Looniversity, and its students serve as the evil counterparts of the Tiny Toons, trying to outdo them at everything, especially sports, even resorting to cheating to ensure that they don't lose.
  O Perfecto Prep, the perfect school,
  where winning is our only rule,
  there is no team we cannot beat,
  because, you see, we always cheat!
• Villainous (Cartoon Network): Black Hat has one of these under his name and image, fitting for the greatest villain in the entire Cartoon Network multiverse. Miss Heed and Dr. Flug both studied here in their youth, and apparently villains from other Cartoon Network (including Nicole Watterson before mellowing out) shows taught or learned here.
• Subverted with Cloud Tower, a boarding school for witches in Winx Club. Despite its dark atmosphere, the school has nothing more than your standard academic rivalry with the protagonists' Alfea Academy. Most witches from the institution, such as Headmistress Griffin, are mischievous at best and mild jerks at worst. In fact, recurring antagonists the Trix get expelled from the school early on precisely because of their evil behavior.

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