The Problems with Accepted

I honestly enjoyed watching Accepted except for one minor, little, eensy weensy detail: no effing way could a few kids create a passable imitation of a real university without accidentally killing a few dozen “students” from malnutrition, asbestos poisoning, industrial accidents, and so on. It's not that I’m being a movie snob, it's just that my suspension of disbelief got stretched a little too far with Accepted and I’ll tell you why.

1) Housing

I’ll be conservative and say that there were 500 students at the South Harmon Institute of Technology, aka SHIT. I did a little research and found that hospitals (and by extension mental hospitals like the one in Accepted) could include the necessary housing for each student. So if there are 300 rooms and 500 students are expected to share them, there are more than enough rooms to go around, right? Wrong. It takes time to learn how to submerge the immediate, naked hatred all people feel for their roommates, and without any supervision the students of SHIT would be free to judge, ridicule, and switch roommates to their heart’s content. Naturally this would leave roughly one third of the student body crying in the bathrooms (and we haven’t even gotten to the sanitation issues there) with another third attempting to coax a hottie into rooming with them and the final third busy crying out back in the bushes. Without administrative support, SHIT wouldn’t get settled for at least two days or more likely a week.

2) Disease Risks

One of the movie’s early gags showed Justin Long’s character rushing to keep his mother from seeing SHIT’s germ and disease-ridden bathroom. I think it’s reasonable to assume that all the bathrooms were like that (and probably a fair number of the dorm rooms because, after all, nobody was supposed to use them). Rampant outbreaks of tetanus and hepatitis, not to mention the expected invasion of STDs, would ravage the collective student body. The CDC would be called in within the first week, turning SHIT into the set for Outbreak.

3) Injury Risks

Skateboard ramps. Authorized dorm room renovations. Telekinesis classes. Now tell me with a straight face that these activities won’t end up in blood and fractured/decapitated limbs? I didn’t think so. I’ve seen real college students take such innocuous items as Elmer’s glue and a Latin textbook and still inflict great bodily pain. Replace the textbook with a sledgehammer and SHIT’s going to get broken.

4) Food

Granted, I didn’t watch the final half hour of Accepted so I didn’t see the team of cooks preparing food for the “university” but for the hour and a half I did see, only one guy was feeding the entire student body. And one guy cannot prepare enough food for 500 people. Heck, one guy can’t make enough food for 100 people, or maybe even fifty people. I can't really offer a reasonable estimate since I can barely feed myself.

Without enough food to eat, you know some of the skinnier students are going to very quickly begin resembling those kids in the African adopt-a-child programs. Even the students with an extra layer of cushion aren’t going to be eating the right combination of foods – the freshman fifteen is very real and rarely the result of too many vegetables – so add scurvy to the list of rampaging diseases on campus. Throw in the occasional case of food poisoning from the under-trained cook(s) and the fake campus isn’t looking so hot.

5) Unwanted Pregnancies

Even if the entire student population is slowly dying from food poisoning, blood loss, and hepatitis, the circle of life will go on. Usually college students are less likely to get pregnant, but remember, these aren’t real college students. And if one of the classes is watching girls sunbathe it’s pretty easy to imagine what the practicum would look like. It wouldn’t be long before SHIT listed Lamaze techniques on its big board of classes.

I’d give SHIT about two weeks before dissolving into a cesspit of disease, malnutrition, and untreated injuries. Any longer than two weeks and the South Harmon Institute of Technology would look an awful lot like a ghetto. I don’t know about you, but I would not want to be accepted into that SHIT.