Elaborate University High

Ah, finally! A high school that includes equestrianism in the curriculum.

A school (usually a Boarding School or, at the very least, a very fancy private day school) typically housing students of high school age (but sometimes younger) but of a size and structure resembling a college/university. Although a story may only follow a few characters, backgrounds and wide angle shots clearly show that the student body is quite large. In anime and manga, this often goes hand in hand with being a One-Gender School.

May or may not be an Academy of Adventure of some sort. May be an Elevator School, needing the size to handle the increased student count from hosting more than one level of education.

Not necessarily related to the many University High Schools in Real Life.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Horitsuba Academy, the city-like academy in The 'Verse of a few of CLAMP's manga, such as Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- and ×××HOLiC.
• True Cross Academy from Blue Exorcist is colossal. The center of the academy is either one giant building, or a small mountain re-purposed as the location for most of the academy's buildings. And then it has a city spread around it. And the academy isn't even full. The main character and his brother have an old dorm to themselves, and there are thousand yard long hallways leading to classrooms meant to hold some 30 students easy that barely have 10, if 10, students. That's the special classes. The regular classes are full, but the place is still huge. It isn't clear if the school has more than just a high school in it as well. If it does, it might very well be up there with Mahora Academy above...
• Classi9 is set in Melite, a huge music school with several rehearsal rooms for operas or symphonies, a large library, classrooms, dorms, etc.
• Ashford Academy in Code Geass, which educates both middle and high school students, like in the British School system, which makes sense, given the series' diverge from history.
• Seiren Gakuen from Dear Brother is a very famous all-girls educational complex / Elevator School covering primary school to university. Students who transfer into the school's junior high or high school divisions, like Nanako or Tomoko, are very uncommon.
• Zashono Academy in Eiken has upwards of fifty thousand students and resembles a small town. It's justified somewhat in that it's an Elevator School, encompassing virtually every level of education, and has a club for just about everything you can think of.
• Eyeshield 21's Ojou High School is practically a cathedral. In fact, the school's primarily there to shuttle its students into Ojou University, on the same grounds.
• Food Wars! has the Totsuki Academy, a culinary school managed by the ridiculously wealthy Nakiri family. Erina, the granddaughter of the headmaster, mentions having about five kitchen buildings for her personal use. Not to mention, the privileges of a member of the Elite 10 includes frequent overseas trip. During the Moon Banquet Festival Arc, each of the Elite 10 members construct their own restaurant buildings.
• Freezing has several schools all over the world under the name Genetics, in which their purpose is to train Battle Couples to defend humanity from monsters from another dimension. Though it's been explicitly stated that all Genetics are military bases, it's still set up as a high school boarding school, complete with top-quality dorms, cafeterias, classrooms, and so on. (The only things missing are the counselors).
• The Alice Academy in Gakuen Alice.
• Shiratorizawa Academy of Haikyuu!!, home of one of the strongest boys' volleyball clubs in Japan is a co-ed boarding middle — and high school in Sendai that's known for its extremely difficult entrance exams so most students get in by studying vigorously or through sport scholarships. The school also owns a large campus with tennis courts, a baseball field, a golf practice area and a horseback riding club with an entire field for it. When Hinata and Kageyama explore their campus for the first time at the start of season 2, they promptly get lost.
• Nagi's school in Hayate the Combat Butler is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to Nagi's school. At one point, she says it's even larger than Vana'diel. The school even has a train service running through it which Nagi explicitly states is because it is so incredibly large.
• There are freaking catacombs in Hayate X Blade's Tenchi Academy.
• From Hell's Kitchen (2010), the Shokusen cooking school is huge. It has farms in the middle of a city in JAPAN, for goodness sake! And apparently its own bioengineering division... in a HIGH school.
• Kamizono Academy (an Elevator School) in Hyakko. To emphasize the point, the main cast spent the entire first episode wandering around the campus, lost. Even Tatsuki, who has been a student there for ten whole years.
• Seiran Academy in Kiss and White Lily for My Dearest Girl is an all-girls Boarding School mixing middle-school, high-school and university. Not that much is seen of the school itself yet, but it has at least an archery and a rose garden.
• Rikkyoin High School in Kujibiki♡Unbalance (both versions).
• Lapis Re:LiGHTs has Flora Girls' Academy for witches. Despite admitting students as young as 13, they have an incredible amount of independence and autonomy with their education, being able to pick and choose whichever of the classes and lessons catch their interest, being encouraged to form their own groups for mutual benefit, and rehearsing for their "Orchestra" performances by themselves. The school also features numerous facilities like dorms, a bathhouse, and a cafeteria, alongside a nearby city that provides everything else (plus a convenient audience).
• In Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, the titular school is based on Tokyo Big Sight, the largest convention center in Japan. As a result, it looks really freaking huge and similar to UTX from the original series in modern design, with some of the characters living on campus in dorms. The school supposedly has over a hundred school clubs. It also has numerous specialized departments and courses, making even its educational structure seem more like a university than a high school.
• Marginal Prince takes place at St. Alphonso Academy, combining Middle and High School years, which is huge and located in the middle of a laurel forest that is almost as big as the whole island it is located on (called St. Alphonso Island, of course). The main building's entrance looks more like a church or castle than anything and inside, the hall presents a collection of paintings and other fine decorations museums would be envious of. The students live in big houses with only a handful of people per house and have their personal butler (one per house). All in all, the school is full of history and prestige. It's kind of justified, as it's a place for the boys of rich and famous families to study at, students need to fulfill certain requirements to enter the school (mostly money or a good name) and the fees they have to pay are probably tremendous.
• Marmalade Boy (also an example of an Elevator School).
• My Hero Academia: U.A.'s property is enormous. Not only does it have the expected teaching buildings for all its students and large and spacious dormitories^note to the tune of one five-story building for a single class of twenty kids once it becomes a Boarding School, it also contains an Olympic-sized sports stadium and several forests and city-sized complexes that the students regularly tear up during hero training. Partially justified by this being set in a world where Everyone Is a Super and manipulating building materials is not out of the question^note one staff member has the power to manipulate concrete, for example, but the property size is still ridiculous given that this is set in a Japanese city.
• Mahora Academy in Negima! Magister Negi Magi is generally presented as the size of a small city.
  • The library building takes up a whole island and is so large that a school club is dedicated to exploring it. It should then be noted that standard equipment for this club includes rock-climbing harnesses and cables because the library features shelves hundreds of feet high, secret crawlspaces (lined with books, no less), and waterfalls, which miraculously don't cause water damage to the books hidden behind them. (A Wizard Did It of course.)
  • The annual School Festival is comparable in scope only to an amusement park (by which we mean Disneyland/Universal Studios level) with elements of a Mardi Gras, and has features such as a Ferris wheel, haunted house with a real ghost, parades complete with giant balloons, giraffes, and elephants, a fighting tournament, several hot air balloons, a few blimps, parades, fireworks, concerts, Humongous Mecha, and a full-scale replica of l'Arc de Triomphe which wasn't there the week before and isn't there the week after.
  • The World Tree is on campus, and is referred to as such.
  • The previous designs for the school went even further, with one of them being a massive, Tower of Babylon-style school building.
  • The Academy is an Elevator School, having elementary, middle and high school, each split by gender, along with a university. If one assumes 12 grades along with Word of God's confirmation of 18 classes per grade with an average of 30 students each, then doubles this amount to account for the gender split, that makes for roughly 12,960 students...not counting the preschool, university, and staff.
  • It's mentioned in one of the anime that Mahora has about 30 THOUSAND students. Yes, students, as in "does not count any of the staff".
• Ouran High School Host Club's Ouran Academy is so over the top that it's Played for Laughs, being a school for rich students. It's also an Elevator School that contains grades from kindergarten through high school, so the size is justified.
• Ohtori Academy from Revolutionary Girl Utena is an enormous academy with several buildings that could be describes as castles. Adolescence of Utena combines this with an enormous dose of Bizarrchitecture, with perpetually moving stairs that lead nowhere.
• Eden College (AKA Eden Academy in other translations) in SPY×FAMILY is a prestigious Elevator School in Ostania. Its also big, and cover many, many subjects. The official Fanbook Eyes Only, mentions that the school is the size of a small town. Since there is no bikes or cars to use in the school grounds, commuting is highly difficult.
• In Sailor Moon, T.A. Academy is the school attended by Rei Hino/Sailor Mars. It's a private, all-girls Catholic elementary, junior high, and high school that was apparently established by missionaries. Although we don't see much of it, what we do see is very impressive; for one, its dining hall looks like a five-star restaurant.
• Seiyo Academy from Shugo Chara! is an elementary school designed to look like a large castle, with countless windows, little towers, and colorful stainglass. Complete with an Absurdly Powerful Student Council whose members have a garden/tearoom to themselves where normal students need to be invited and are excluded from the dress code.
• The titular Stella Academy in Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C³. Among other things, it has its own sprawling airsoft range where the girls practice their skills.
• Duel Academia in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, which is located on a private island large enough for one student to become lost in the woods within school grounds for several weeks. There is also a volcano. Explained by Seto Kaiba backing it.

Comic Books

• Robin (1993): Brentwood Academy, a private boarding school in the township across the river from Gotham where Tim Drake is sent in anger by his father, has a huge campus covering over a hundred acres and its students come from very well off families, including foreign nobility.
• X-Men: The Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters has been this at various points, depending mostly on the writing staff. The Institute's cover is long since blown, but it's still supposed to be a school.

Fan Works

• The Ben 10 Fanfiction Hero High: Sphinx Academy, takes place at Sphinx Academy. The school ground used to be San Francisco which was somehow destroyed in a large incident but was then turned into a massive city size school that taught everyone from preschool till university. The student body also worked in the city part of the city school.
• The St. Hetalia Academy for Boys of Outcast, a Hetalia: Axis Powers High School AU. The campus is dominated by a towering lakefront castle with dorms, classrooms, and the school library all located in the same building. Meals are served buffet-style in a large, fancy dining hall with mahogany tables and crystal chandeliers. There's even a subterranean hot spring onsite, which has been converted into a spa-like facility for the students to make use of. It's later revealed that the school has been built atop a massive underground complex housing the nigh-immortal founders, totally hidden from the student body aside from the Absurdly Powerful Student Council. The expansive subterranean compound is outfitted with amenities like a hospital ward, indoor stadium, and its own private trolley system. There's also an airplane hanger with an exclusive private jet hidden somewhere on or near campus. The Academy's sister school, the St. Hetalia Girl's Conservatoire, is mentioned to have its own palatial campus just across the water.
• Royal Heights is a multilevel academy with castle inspired structures, a rose garden, dense forests, and plenty of highly elaborate technology to boot.
• In Super Robot Wars High, the titular place is described as being the size of a medium sized city, has a ton of facilities that most gigantic real world high school-college fusions wouldn't have justified, as it also doubles a massive cross cultural embassy and a secret training ground for the majority of the members of Project Aegis, and provides classes on LOTS of topics, though they specialize in engineering, cultural, and applied sciences which actually is to the benefit of Project Aegis.
• Balliol Prep from To Hell and Back (Arrowverse), the school that Oliver, Tommy, Laurel, and Sara attended, and also where Thea, Kal, and Ruby attend in the present storyline. This is justified, as Balliol is a prestigious academy that caters specifically to Starling City's elite. A person has to apply in order to attend, and not even high monetary status guarantees acceptance.
• Tokimeki PokéLive! and TwinBee has Nijigasaki High, Otonokizaka High, Uranohoshi Girls' High and Yuigaoka Girls' High just like Love Live! proper in addition to two schools exclusive to this AU, Higashi High (An all-male high school) and Hinagiku Elementary (An all-girls elementary school).

Films — Animated

• Canterlot High in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, though this is debatable, since we don't see much besides the school. More and more areas of the school appear with each subsequent instalment, though the one that appears the most is the cafeteria.

Films — Live-Action

• Our Miss Brooks:
  • Usually averted on radio and television. Madison High School's facilities seem to par for the course. Miss Brooks frequently criticizes her low pay, and episodes focus on various austerity measures (i.e. "Blue Goldfish"). The most tony aspects of the school are the ivy-covered walls and the bust of the founder, Yodar Kritch. Once or twice, the gymnasium is said to be in a separate building than the main school.
  • Elaborate University High goes into play in The Movie Grand Finale. Madison High School is a very large building with substantial grounds. It even has tennis courts! The exteriors for the film were shot at the real-life Herbert Hoover High School in Glendale, California.
• In The Crimson Rivers, the fictional University of Guernon, one of the oldest such institutions in continental Europe, lies in a remote valley in the French Alps, and has its own hospital (the only one in the area, with maternity ward and a morgue), a sports stadium, a sizeable library, a direct link to the mountains (including a helicopter, a cableway, at least one snowmobile, and a whole mountain rescue section), and the university's dean parctically holds governance of the whole countryside. In fact Guernon are so big, old and remote that they even have their own eugenics programme and inbreeding traditions.
• Dead Poets Society, filmed at an actual example of such an institution.
• Rushmore, the eponymous school of Wes Anderson's film.
• The public, non-boarding high school from 10 Things I Hate About You. Exteriors showed Tacoma's Stadium High — a Real Life public school that happens to look like a castle.
• St. Matthew's from School Ties qualifies.
• In Toy Soldiers, the fictional Regis School is one of these.
• Taps takes place at (fictional) Bunker Hill Academy, a military school that is effectively a junior military academy for children and teens who aspire to one day attend the real deal. As such, its facilities mimic those of a military academy... and its armory would be the envy of one.

Literature

• Academy City in A Certain Magical Index. One-third the size of Tokyo and about 80% of the 2.3 million occupants are students, some with powers. Could be an aversion in that there are actually many different schools in the city, but life within the city seems to center on either schooling or research. Its technology and scientific knowledge are roughly twenty years ahead of the rest of the world, and it's a global political power despite just being a single city.
• Constantin Magical Academy in Demon King Daimao has its own catacombs, and the student council president has her own mansion.
• St. Marguerite Academy in Gosick. Only its library is a tower. With a garden on its rooftop!
• Harry Potter: Hogwarts is a seven-store medieval castle surrounded by the Forbidden Forest and the Black Lake. The castle is so vast and riddled with secret passages and moving stairs, that first-year students struggle to orientate themselves. Justified in that it's not only a boarding school but the only wizarding school in all of Great Britain — it doesn't help that higher education is not done in colleges but as training programs in workplaces. Therefore, it has to have plenty of space to accommodate four Houses worth of students ranging from eleven to seventeen, as well as classrooms for several indoor and outdoor courses and a Quidditch stadium for the inter-House games.
• H.I.V.E. Series: H.I.V.E (The Higher Institute Of Villainous Education) is built inside a volcano, and therefore contains a mountains worth of facilities, such as a hanger, swimming pool, library, greenhouses, tech labs, hologram arenas, docks etc.
• The Hearts We Sold: Brannigan is a highly expensive, exclusive boarding school. The protagonist's desperation to pay her tuition is what kick-starts the plot.
• The Royal Academy of Bauer Kingdom, in I'm In Love With the Villainess. Justified in that the world is at the medieval period, when only aristocrats and royalty could afford education, and made damn sure that the students would have the same amenities as they do at home.
• Hakureiryou High in Ladies versus Butlers!, which not only caters to rich girls but even has its own hot spring that no one used or mentioned until the psuedo-Hot Springs Episode.
• A plot point in Lemonade Mouth, where the principal's focus is on funding elaborate new facilities.
• Lillian Girls' School in Maria Watches Over Us, which is also an Elevator School. Except that Lillian's doesn't appear to have high school dorms, and also has a University.
• Strawberry Panic! whose schools, as pictured above, boast helicopters, horse ranches, and their own church. The presence of the church not being ironic at all given the context...
• St. Vladimir's in Vampire Academy. Justified in that academies like St. Vladimir's are designed to house and protect its students their whole adolescent lives. Rose, for example, was pretty much raised by the Academy.
  • And Amberwood Prep in the spin-off series Bloodlines.
• Superhero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe. Seven dorms, a physical education building with a large annex, three swimming pools, two full-sized indoor gymnasiums, a cafeteria that's inside a geodesic dome big enough to seat maybe six hundred, several large school buildings, an astronomy tower, a university-sized library that has really restricted sections, a church, a massive campus store, a horse stable and riding trails, and miles and miles of underground areas, including: a power plant, three combat arenas and a holographic simulation center, dozens and dozens of public and private labs for the devisers and gadgeteers, you name it. It's so big it has its own building for the security teams. Classes range from middle school and remedial education courses to special-topic courses at the post-doctoral level, with topics which include powers theory, magic, and super-science. All of this for what would be considered middle size for a US boarding school (about 650 students), even if it is huge by Superhero School standards.
• Some portions of John Irving's novels are set in fictional versions of his prep school: Phillips Exeter Academy in A Widow for One Year; Steering School in The World According to Garp.

Live Action TV

• The fictional West Beverly Hills High from the original Beverly Hills, 90210. Filmed at Torrance High School.
• Greendale Community College of Community fame is partially this and partially an inversion. It's ostensibly a small two-year (later four-year) community college. When it serves the plot for it to have features more typically associated with a high school, such as lockers, it does. And when it serves the plot for it to have features more typically associated with a four-year college, such as a competitive (in the sense that they participate in competition, not the sense that they actually stand a chance at winning) football team, an elaborate dining hall, and dorm halls, it has those.
• Chilton, the alma mater of Rory Gilmore in Gilmore Girls is a co-ed, day school example. It's based on the real Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, CT, but Greystone Mansion, where the school is shot, is significantly larger than the grounds of Choate.
• Dalton Academy in Glee, the all boys school and home of the Warblers, certainly has a grand interior, although the exterior has not yet been seen.
• Medenham Hall in HEX is supposedly a school, but has an elaborate campus, pupils who all seem to be in their late teens, and a complete lack of supervision outside classes, that makes it seem more like a university.
• Xavier Academy in Mr. D, and by extension Citadel High School in Halifax, NS where it's filmed.
• Despite the episode always taking place in the school during school hours, the students of Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide spend a disproportionately large amount of time in extracurricular clubs, the cafeteria, the outside lunch area, the janitor's closet, the hallways... anywhere but class, giving the impression of having as much free time as most college students. (Subverted to some extent by the occasional teacher asking to see hall passes, which are produced as though from Hammerspace, with an appropriate sound effect.)
• Our Miss Brooks:
  • Usually averted on radio and television in Our Miss Brooks. Madison High School's facilities seem to par for the course. Miss Brooks frequently criticizes her low pay, and episodes focus on various austerity measures (i.e. "Blue Goldfish"). The most tony aspects of the school are the ivy-covered walls and the bust of the founder, Yodar Kritch. Once or twice, the gymnasium is said to be in a separate building than the main school.
  • Elaborate University High goes into play in The Movie Grand Finale. Madison High School is a very large building with substantial grounds. It even has tennis courts!
• The Elite Way School in Rebelde, a Mexican telenovela. Rebelde, in turn, was based on Argentinian telenovela Rebelde Way. The Elite Way School didn't make much sense there, either. The real location of the Mexican version is actually a Golf club!!!
• Tower Prep in Tower Prep.
• Pacific Coast Academy in Zoey 101 takes this to a literal extreme — exterior scenes are shot on location at Pepperdine University.

Tabletop Games

• Teen Champions for the Hero System includes the Ravenswood Academy, an elaborate private school campus in Michigan that secretly educates and trains adolescent superheroes. The school not only has extensive facilities, some of those facilities have secret underground levels.

Video Games

• Bullworth Academy in Bully fits this trope to a tee, and is also an Elevator School.
• Maritsu Evil Academy in Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice. People who have gone looking for the Home-Ec classrooms have never been heard from again, and the seniors are considered a myth, due to no one ever being able to pinpoint the location of their classrooms. It helps that it's strongly implied that the school's campus is the entire world.
• Ensemble Stars!: While Yumenosaki Academy doesn't look quite as impressive as other examples on this page (though the rooftop garden terrace is very pretty), there's a lot going on behind the scenes: first of all, it actually has two campuses, one 'normal' school and then the idol division, with a strict separation between them to protect the celebrity students. Secondly, it offers its own in-school jobs that students can take to raise money for their idol units. Thirdly, those in-school jobs don't pay out money, but rather the school's own official cryptocurrency which can only be exchanged within the school. It's also eventually revealed that Yumenosaki is an international organization with sister schools in other countries.
• The mercenary organization SeeD in Final Fantasy VIII has schools in the form of the "Garden" military academies that turned into flying battleships. Even before liftoff, the school interior is bigger than the Vatican.
• Monark has Shin Mikado Academy, an Elevator School that is famous for being one of Japan's most prestigious and exclusive academies with an incredibly generous scholarship program to students of lower socioeconomic status. Though we only see the main administrative buildings and the high school areas, the campus has two separate three-story buildings for all 2nd and 1st year high school students (the administrative building also houses the 3rd year classrooms), a massive 3-story archives for its history and other exhibitions, a 3-story library that is the largest, most extensive collections in the world with numerous rare books and collections, several blocks worth of rooms and sports facilities for extra-curricular activities, and a giant memorial garden with the ruins of the old dormitory from its founding years.
• Leafmore High School in ObsCure. Its facilities include both the ordinary (a library, a gymnasium, dormitories) and the not-so-ordinary (a theater, a botanical garden), but where it really comes through is in its Art Nouveau architecture, with a vast central courtyard and all manner of creepy statues. It looks as if the Spencer estate were used as a school. Then you get into the secret tunnels beneath the place that house a Mad Scientist's laboratory. Here is a fan-drawn map of the campus.
• Belles Fleurs Academy of Omega Labyrinth Life was and still is a school for the daughters of the world's richest, most prestigious, and influential, with a massive, elaborate campus to match. Among other facilities, it has a mansion-like dormitory for its students equipped with its own natural hot springs, a dining hall with a professional five-star kitchen plus staff, an archery range, a tennis court, a track field, a giant lecture hall, and a dedicated landscaping building for its Grand Garden and the stream-irrigation system that runs through the campus.
• In Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, Academy of Adventure Naranja/Uva Academy is the oldest school in the Paldea Region and the website states that it "boasts a history that few other schools do". It also takes the "University High" part a bit more literally, as the website notes that age is not an issue when it comes to enrollment, with adults taking classes at the Academy as well. Many schools in Spain (one of Paldea's counterparts) provide both secondary and post-secondary education on the same campus, so this does have some real-world basis.
• Princess Maker 5: As Emily says:
  'Shirasagi Academy', accomodates
  all institutions ranging
  from elementary curriculums
  to that of post-secondary
• Justice High School from Rival Schools.^note Which is where the game gets it's Japanese title from ("Shiritsu Justice Gakuen", or "Justice Private Academy", or simply "Justice Academy"). Billed as the most exclusive school in Japan, it's the seat of future leaders and diplomats. ..But mostly supervillains.
  • Also Gorin High, billed as THE school for future sportsmen and sportswomen. It has sections for junior high, highschool (attended by Roberto, Shouma, Natsu and Momo) AND university (attended by Shouma's older brother and Nagare).
• All the schools in Senran Kagura are this. Admittedly, they double as dojos for the nation's resident demon-slayers (some of whom moonlight as elite mercenaries) but...Gessen's common room has a freakin' pond! And entirely aesthetic wrought-iron fences!
• Twisted Wonderland: Night Raven College is one of the best magic schools in the setting and it shows: it has a huge, castle-like main campus with many facilities in separate buildings, seven dorms (one of which has a built-in café), two stadiums, and several sets of fancy-looking uniforms. It is not a university; freshman age starts as 16, and "college" here is used in the sense meaning "high school".

Visual Novels

• Hope's Peak Academy, the setting of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, is one of these; a school that recruits only the most talented students it can find. However, by the time of the games, the academy has been hijacked by a psychotic robot teddy bear, who forces its students into a murderous game.
• Yamaku High School in Katawa Shoujo is absurdly large and well furnished, though this is handwaved in the game with the school having very good funding. The size can be justified, however, since it's a school for physically disabled students and some of them would need a good amount of room to move around.
• Vincennes Private Girls Academy in Princess Evangile is even considered as this In-Universe. They only accept the daughters of the most prestigious families, and have spared no cent in furnishings and infrastructure. The school's grounds also cover virtually the entire summit of the mountain its built on, even having its own private lake and a lodge to go with it.
• St. Louis High in Storm Lover, with its incredibly high admission rates and incredible library that is visited even by students outside the school.

Webcomics

• Gunnerkrigg Court, to the point where wide angle shots of the student body (or anyone outside Annie's class) are noticeably absent, though other students do apparently exist... somewhere. Notable facilities include animal cages big enough for dragons and a full monorail system, and at least two "Holodecks".
  • And an aerial view reveals that it rivals Mahora Academy in area.
  • Both Justified and Lampshaded: Gunnerkrigg Court's real purpose is just one of the dozens of unanswered questions. Lampshaded here.
  Tom: My school had one of these. No wait, they had a bike rack.

Western Animation

• Whether or not Kadic Academy of Code Lyoko is this is debatable. It has a pretty small student body, but it does have a whole lot of buildings and land...
  • Considering the extremely tight historical connections between Kadic, the factory, the power plant, and the Hermitage, the school's environs most definitely count.
• Ever After High (having been built for the royalty of many different countries) has its own stables, dragon-racing arena, a six-story library, greenhouse, and not-IPads personally assigned to every student.
• Super posh Morningwood Academy from Family Guy is one of these.
• Fillmore! does this with a middle school, with X Middle School being a sprawling institution that functions very much like a small city. One episode lampshades it as "one of the largest middle schools in the country."
  • Highlights include the corn maze, multiple composting piles for the garden club, an ice rink and Olympic sized pool, RC car track, convention hall, pier, boat dock, and more club rooms than you can shake a stick at (pottery club with giant kiln, cooking club bigger than most residential kitchens, and a Safety Patrol will full forensic abilities). Mostly Played for Laughs.
  • It's so big that the hallways are wide enough to allow (and the school large enough to justify) the principal to drive around(or rather, be driven around, by her own personal Yes-Man no less) in her own personal vehicle in doors, with at least a meter or two to either side for student traffic. It also bears mentioning that there are lockers along the wall. Meaning that all the main corridors are big enough to have roughly 3-4 feet of locker counting both walls, room for roughly 4-5 middle school students walk comfortably, and STILL accommodate her own personal enlarged golf cart.
• Acme Looniversity, from Tiny Toon Adventures.
• Beverly High in Totally Spies!, mildly justified as it is set in Beverly Hills.

Real Life

• Many private prep schools and boarding schools are like this.
  • Adelaide has Rostrevor College, which, despite its name, is an R-12 boys' day and boarding school. Apparently, it used to own part of a national park.
  • Oundle School in Northamptonshire, England is rather like this, along with many other private English schools. Its various buildings take up much of the town center, and it has at least one 'outpost' in a nearby village. And it has its own radio station.
  • Nearby Uppingham and Oakham schools in Rutland, England are similar in amount of students and number of boarding houses.
  • Eton College, easily one of the most prestigious, expensive, and exclusive of British private boarding schools, is fairly private about its extensive and ancient facilities.
  • The Roedean School is an all-girls' boarding school that is essentially Eton's Distaff Counterpart. On top of housing and classrooms, it has a chapel (complete with cloisters and pipe organ), its own farm, huge athletic fields, a dedicated section of beach accessed through a "secret tunnel to the sea", an entirely separate building for its sixth-form students, and a quad, making it more comparable to a small university than a high school.
  • Even though the page picture's caption is a joke, the Madeira School, a private girls' school in McLean, Virginia, actually does keep horses on its ludicrously huge campus and offer horseback riding as part of its curriculum.
  • Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts is situated on roughly 500 acres (2 sq. km). In addition to a host of academic, athletic, and dormitory facilities, the school has several lakes, two museums, and a large wooded area.
  • The Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield, Michigan sit on a 319 acre campus littered with famous sculptures. Amusingly, the schools are K-12 and graduate level, but no college.
  • Victoria College, Alexandria (in Egypt) was intended to be a sort of Middle Eastern Eton, and as such has about as elaborate a campus as a high school can have in the middle of a major city.
  • France has the Dumont-D'Urville High School in Toulon on the French Riviera : opened before the boom of urban sprawl in France in 1957, it owns eleven hectares of land with a swimming pool (integrated INTO the school !), offers 8 different curricula, has several CPGE (special post-high school classes for the elite) two gymnasiums and a soccer stadium. It is also in part a boarding school with dormitories for a few dozens students of the CPGE. Unlike other examples on this list, this one is actually a public school.
• Some high schools share their campus with actual universities, meaning they also share buildings and occasionally teachers.
  • In Adelaide, Golden Grove High School, Gleeson Christian College, and Pedare Christian College all back on to one another at a central point. That central point happens to be Golden Grove Performing Arts and Recreation Centre. In the foreseeable future, these three schools might, with a few boundary changes (the local shopping center and a nearby apartment complex), become an Elaborate University High.
  • Alvin High School in Alvin, Texas took over a community college campus when the college moved to new grounds.
  • University High School in Urbana, IL, is situated on the University of Illinois campus and makes routine use of nearby U of I gym facilities, library resources, and computer labs. It helps that "Uni" started out as a prep school for seniors bound for the U of I, and remains a "magnet" school for gifted students expected to pursue higher studies.
  • Greenwood Laboratory School in Springfield, Missouri is located on the campus of Missouri State University.
• The Norwich Free Academy in Norwich, Connecticut consists of seven different buildings in which classes are typically held (Tirrel, Cranston, Shattuck, Bradlaw, Frank, Converse, and parts of Latham), most of which have three floors, as well as a very large library (Latham), a building reserved for administrative offices (Alice House), Alumni House, and a museum (The Slater Museum), which holds one of the finest collections of Classical statue-casts in the US. The school is public and state-funded but not controlled by the local school district, and provides education for over 2500 students.
• Davis Senior High in Davis, California has barns, restaurants, and a fully-equipped auto shop on campus, among other things, and can proudly boast classes and experiences most people don't even get even in college.
• Plymouth-Canton Educational Park in Canton, Michigan consisting of three high schools on one campus, has a restaurant, an auto-shop, a radio station, a forest containing an artesian well, and a stream running crossing the entire campus. It formerly had a barn as well, before it was moved off-campus.
• Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts just completed a $200 million (yes, you read that right) renovation.
• Many high schools in New York City have open campuses. Often, there is a (relatively) modest school building that is located right next to stores, parks, cafes, etc. that the students all have access to during the day. Sometimes, gym and other classes may be held in different parts of the city.
• Newer suburban high schools in warm-weather parts of the US, such as California, Texas, and Florida, tend to consist of many detached single-story buildings, spread out over a large area and connected by open "breezeways" instead of hallways. It's quite common for a large high school to take up just as much land as a small college, to the point that it's very easy to confuse the two when viewed from a distance.
• Though not a private school, Barker College (located north-west of Sydney) is quite large, taking up 44 hectares.
• Schools in the North Texas area fit this trope very well. If you Google images of Hockaday School for Girls, or Plano East Senior High school, you will find that they are all giant open campuses with nice courtyards/ponds.
• While it's only one part of the school, high school football stadiums in many Southern states (especially Texas) can put many minor league fields to shame. Allen High School in the Dallas suburb of Allen, for instance, has Eagle Stadium, which cost $60 million, seats 18,000 people, and has a 38-foot Jumbotron... and, just eighteen months after its opening, had to be closed for renovations for over a year when giant cracks were discovered in the concrete, with later inspection revealing massive structural faults. Not to be outdone, voters in the Houston suburb of Katy authorized $58 million to build a 12,000-seat stadium for their Tigers. In case you couldn't gather, high school football is Serious Business in Texas, and (to a slightly less manic degree) in much of the South.
• Pinkerton Academy in Derry, NH the largest high school in New Hampshire with roughly 3,200 students. It is technically a private school, but serves as the public school for Derry, Hampstead, Chester, Auburn, Candia, and Hooksett through a deal where the towns pay for their students' tuition. Pinkerton Academy's property spans over 170 acres; a 120-acre campus in Derry and a 50-acre forest preserve in Chester. The main campus is 8 acres, leaving 162 acres for extracurricular activities. There are 13 academic buildings which are located in the main campus. Plays and local events are shown at the Stockbridge Theatre, which seats 850 people. In addition, there are smaller, non-academic buildings around the main campus. 95 acres are used for athletic fields, faculty housing, and farmland.

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