College movies are a cinema staple, delivering those who attended college doses of nostalgia and those who didn’t plenty of drama, comedy, and general mishaps to hold their interest. Films with college as the backdrop often focus on characters who are learning what it means to be an adult for the first time, and these stories rarely feature a smooth journey.
Stacker gathered popular college movies from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, pulling each film’s audience-based IMDb rating and critic-based Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer rating. All relevant movies were then ranked based on the Stacker Score metric, which weighs both the IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes measurements equally. The top 50 are presented here and ranked from worst to best. While college isn’t always the focus of the films on this list, it is the setting at the very least. Also included are details about how the film and its creators have impacted college students and culture at large.