Higher Learning

Higher Learning (1995) is a social drama you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by John Singleton three years after Boyz n the Hood. The setting is Columbus University, and the question hanging over every dorm room is whether education actually levels the playing field or just puts everyone's prejudices in closer proximity.

Omar Epps plays Malik, a track scholarship student who expected college to feel like arrival — it doesn't. Ice Cube is Fudge, a sixth-year undergrad who has built a sharp political worldview and uses it to pull Malik in one direction. Michael Rapaport plays Remy, a lost white kid who gets pulled in an entirely different and far more dangerous one. Lawrence Fishburne, Jennifer Connelly, and Tyra Banks fill out a cast that Singleton uses to run every angle of campus life — race, assault, radicalization — without softening any of them.

The film opened in January 1995 and landed harder than most college dramas dare to. Stream Higher Learning (1995) on iFILM.