After receiving his latest college rejection letter, senior Bartleby Gaines devises a novel way to fool everyone into thinking he is college-bound: Open his own university. Bartleby and his similarly stymied friends take over an abandoned building, create a fake website, hire a friend's uncle to pose as the dean, and -- presto -- a school is born. However, they do their jobs too well, and soon many other rejects try to gain admittance to the nonexistent South Harmon Institute of Technology.