Accepted is a 2006 comedy film. The plot centers around two groups, one of which is a group of high school seniors, who after being rejected from all the colleges to which they had applied, proceed to "create" their own "college". The other group is composed of fraternity freshmen who attend a prestigious university nearby.

The plot adversity is created through a situation where the Dean of the nearby prestigious university attempts to use one of his students to assist him in this endeavor to acquire adjacent and abutting realty to expand its campus to create an adjacent park-like expanse, and the recalcitrant upstarts whose "college" (housed in an abandoned psychiatric hospital) begins to flourish and who refuse to facilitate the sale of their leasehold to the university. They call their college "South Harmon Institute of Technology" ("S.H.I.T.") and proceed to develop a facility, a curriculum, and a faculty, and thereby ultimately are accorded provisional accreditation by the state board of education when this is satisfactorily demonstrated.

Though presented as a light comedy, the film's undertone throughout is highly critical of the U.S. college system (and the college ranking system).

Plot

The plot begins with Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long), a persuasive high-school senior who, among other pranks, creates fake IDs. He is stunned when he is rejected by every college he applies to. In an attempt to seek approval from his father (Mark Derwin), who believes that Bartleby is doomed to fail in society if he doesn't get into college, Bartleby creates a fake college, the South Harmon Institute of Technology. He is aided by his friend Sherman Schrader III (Jonah Hill), who has been accepted into the prestigious Harmon College, and fellow rejects Rory (Maria Thayer), Glen (Adam Herschman) and Hands (Columbus Short).

Bartleby takes steps to facilitate his very thorough father. He has Sherman create a fully-functional website. Arriving at the conclusion that a campus is required to continue the ruse, Bartleby leases an abandoned psychiatric hospital adjacent to the campus of Harmon College and renovates it to look like a college campus. When his father insists on meeting the Dean, he hires Schrader's uncle, Ben Lewis (Lewis Black), to play that role.

The seemingly innocent ploy quickly spins out of control when the website which automatically accepts any applicant, enrolls hundreds of students after their attempts to enter other colleges were similarly rejected. Bartleby realizes that these people have nowhere else to go, and so lets them believe that the school is real. After being disenchanted with the status quo, he has the students make up their own classes and be their own teachers.