You can learn a lot about a lot of things from movies.

What college is really like isn't necessarily one of them. But that's OK.

A movie about long hours of someone reading a book in the library would be an interminable bore (or possibly an art-house hit). In the same way you don't see a lot of movies about firefighters watching television between calls or detectives filling out paperwork, movies about the college experience tend to be amped up, exaggerated, crazier than the real thing.

Either that or I didn't have as much fun as I should have (and I had a fair amount of fun).

You can blame "Animal House" for this. Seems an odd choice, because it's the best college movie ever, and one of the funniest movies ever. But not many students sneaked a horse into the dean's office (inadvertently killing the steed), seduced the dean's wife or incited a riot at a parade. Sure, maybe one of the three, but . . .

Besides the hazing and the boozing and Otis Day & the Nights, "Animal House" does include a few things about college most students experience: friendship, camaraderie, the value of pulling together.

Also: Toga! Toga! TOGA!

Better to look elsewhere for something a little more like the college experience, then.

"The Paper Chase" is a somewhat more realistic depiction of the pressures of making good grades (something they value pretty highly at Harvard's law school). But of all the girls on campus to fall for, Timothy Bottoms goes for the daughter of his imperious professor (Lindsay Wagner and John Houseman, in that order)! Not very likely.

"The Sure Thing" has brief scenes in which John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga paint a pretty accurate picture of how goofy writing classes can be (as an English major, I can vouch for it), thanks to the wonderfully loopy performance of Viveca Lindfors as their instructor. (" 'Nubile,' by the way, is spelled with a 'u.' ")

There's nothing particularly realistic about "Real Genius," set at a fictitious school for brainiacs, but Val Kilmer is genuinely funny (you don't get to say that very often) and the plight of young student Mitch (Gabriel Jarret) is familiar to any freshman, even if they're older - everyone feels out of place at first; college, like the rest of life, is something you grow into.

And, eventually, grow out of. Unless you're the guys in "Old School," who have long since graduated but go back and create their own fraternity. It's ridiculous, of course, but it's funny, and it's one of the last truly good movies Will Ferrell has been in. And when critics were writing their mostly positive reviews, they often made favorable comparisons to "Animal House."

Circle of cinematic life, all that.

Really, movies about college aren't all that different from college itself. It's best to take a little of what's useful from this, a little from that and make the overall experience add up to something genuinely valuable.

And remember, fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

Goodykoontz