And you still don't have the right look
And you don't have the right friends
Nothing changes but the faces, the names, and the trends
High school never ends!
And you don't have the right friends
Nothing changes but the faces, the names, and the trends
High school never ends!
—"High School Never Ends", Bowling for Soup
An index for tropes about or tied to high school and secondary education, typically encompassing grades 9-12 and ages 14-18. Strongly connected to Teenage Tropes. Precedes Tertiary Education Tropes. Related to Popularity Food Chain.
Tropes
- Absurdly Powerful Student Council
- Alpha Bitch: The most common setting for an obnoxious popular girl is high school.
- Best Years of Your Life: Words of encouragement from parents towards their children in high school.
- Carload of Cool Kids: High school students are common instigators of showoffs in a vehicle.
- College Is "High School, Part 2": College in the movies is just as exaggerated as high school.
- Dawson Casting: High school movies and television series very frequently hire young adult actors to portray teenage characters due to child labor laws restricting the availability of real teens.
- Drama Club
- Elaborate University High: A big, fancy-looking high school.
- Freshman Fears: Freshmen grow fears of starting high school.
- Gotta Pass the Class: A student must get good grades lest they fail and have to attend summer school.
- Graduation for Everyone
- High School: The main setting of this trope.
- High School AU: A Fan Fic where the characters are high school students.
- High-School Dance: A prom held in ceremony of graduation.
- High-School Hustler: The rebel in high school.
- High-School Rejects
- High School Rocks: High school is seen as cool.
- High-School Sweethearts: A couple whose love started in high school ends up getting married.
- Jerk Jock: As with the Alpha Bitch, the Jerkass quarterback is a recurring archetype in high school media.
- Junior High: The training course for preteens and young teens to shed them out of elementary school and prepare them for high school.
- Ordinary High-School Student
- Peer as Teacher: A teacher who is in the same peer group as their students.
- The Prom Plot
- The Promposal
- School Newspaper News Hound
- Senior Year Struggles
- Sex Miseducation Class: Students in high school are taught lies about human sexuality.
- Shop Class
- Stranger in a Strange School
- Teen Drama: High school is a common setting for this genre.
- TV Teen