College and University are some of the most important decisions that parents and children will ever make in their lifetime. They are not just looking for a place that will earn them a degree and help them get a good job when they enter the marketplace. They want an institution that will mold and inspire their dreams and passions in life. They want a university that will not only show them how to make those dreams come to life, but also show them how to leave a positive mark on the world and help usher a new age of enlightenment and understanding for all of mankind. And if you can’t find one of those places for under $30,000 a year, just be thankful you’re not stuck at one of these scholastic sinkholes.

Faber College from “National Lampoon’s Animal House”

It would be easy to blame a single fraternity or even the poorly managed fraternity system for this college campus’ low online university rating. Not that there isn’t blame to go around when you realize that in one fraternity alone, the highest single semester GPA tops out at 1.6, an academic achievement that would put this college just below the school that Supercuts employees attend to get their masters in hair collecting.

A larger problem lies within its hallowed halls, one that reeks of politics and corruption. They don’t just use monies from student funds as “honorariums” to bribe local officials or let sons of benefactors run the fraternity row. They railroad a perfectly innocent group of smart and articulate (albeit sometimes sober) students and ruin their educations in the process in the name of continuing tradition, even in the face of change.

South Central Louisiana State University from “The Waterboy”

Sports and college have gone together since our nation’s biggest educational institutions first started putting their entire student body in debt for life, so the locker rooms could have steel-enforced toilets for their over-roided linebackers.

This school doesn’t have the kind of pull that one in the Big 12 or SEC conference would, assuming that they are even in a conference to begin with but they do give a backwoods simpleton a free, all-expenses-paid education just so he can join the team and put their opponents’ quarterbacks in neck halos for the rest of the season. The neck halos were also paid for by the students, which ties a rock to their ranking by making other universities suffer as well.

Medfield College from “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes,” “The Strongest Man in the World” and “Now You See Him, Now You Don’t”

It’s been said that colleges and universities’ level of success, particularly in their science departments, can’t be measured by what they produce. Their true level of success can only be measured by the mark their work leaves on the world.

By some stroke of insane luck, this school has somehow managed to discover how to make human beings as smart as high capacity computers, as strong as super-human gods and as invisible as a poor person to a high ranking House Republican and none of these marvelous innovations have been able to find their way into the real world. Plus the school’s dean of academics stubbornly refuses to put any money into anything other than his own office, even at the risk of slowing their academic progress.

Adams College from “Revenge of the Nerds”

Jocks didn’t always rule the college campus. There was a time when even the most elite athletes in major league sports got paid menial salaries that didn’t even touch the poverty line, even at a time in our nation’s economy when you could barter a bag of apples for a smile and one of your strongest children.

Then colleges saw the revenue stream they could earn and an easy way to keep benefactors happy by having a sports team or two on campus to “fight, fight, fight” for their alma mater. Pretty soon, the beast became a monster that couldn’t be fed and, as they say, the inmates took over the asylum. That might as well be this college’s student motto since the jocks and their coach have the first, the last and every other word on anything that goes on at their school from housing to fraternity membership to whether or not the cafeteria has “Pudding Friday”.

Grand Lakes University from “Back to School”

Where would colleges and universities be without their generous benefactors and most devoted alumni? They’d probably have enough tickets for the football team’s home games so that some actual students could attend them if they didn’t give them away to anyone who ever gave a dime to a dean without it coming from a Pell grant or a student loan.

Thornton Melon decides its time to get his degree when his son backs out, so he gives a big chunk of change to his son’s school not only so he can attend classes but also so he can remodel and live on campus in a dorm room that would make Donald Trump reach for the number of his interior decorator. Still, that really wouldn’t affect their online university rankings all that much. The fact, however, that they hired a Vietnam veteran suffering from an industrial strength sized case of post-traumatic stress disorder to teach American history sends their rating plummeting to the bottom, just below Hamburger University, the St. Augustine School of Welding and Blackjack Dealing and Pat Robertson’s law school.