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In John Singleton's powerful portrait of college life in the 1990s, a group of incoming freshmen at Columbus University encounter racial tension, rape, responsibility, and the meaning of an education on a university campus.
Presenting problems is not the same as dramatizing them successfully, and as strong as his message is, Singleton has not found the best way to deliver it.
Singleton gets points for exposing the hypocrisy of "politically correct" institutions, but stilted dialogue and cardboard characterizations undermine the message.
John Singleton at his most pretentious and preachy.
January 27, 2004
Moviehole
Another tour-de-force for Singleton
March 23, 2005
Rolling Stone
Higher Learning is often clichéd, unfocused and didactic. But Singleton has a goal most of his contemporaries have given up on: He wants to make a movie that makes a difference.
May 12, 2001
Entertainment Weekly
Despite some likable performances (Epps is especially winning), the drama in Higher Learning is constricted, hemmed in by Singleton's compulsion to view his characters as walking paradigms of racial and sexual politics.
A stylish, intelligent film-maker, Singleton interweaves the threads of his demographic tapestry with assurance, passion and a welcome awareness of the complexities of the college community's contradictory impulses towards integration and separatism.
Everyone here, from beer-swilling white fraternity boys to rap-loving black students harassed by the campus police, can be judged at face value. Everyone is exactly what he or she seems.