Cool School

This is the educational equivalent of the Cool Car and its vehicular brethren. It's often an Academy of Adventure and/or an Elaborate University High, and frequently an Extranormal Institute, but none of those tropes apply in all cases.

So then how do you know it's this trope? The Cool School is too cool to be your school, a school that's probably very good at teaching, thanks to no shortage of funding and/or a Reasonable Authority Figure (or a few). Expect the textbooks and the Applied Phlebotinum to be full of Dangerous Forbidden Techniques and Sufficiently Advanced Technology or Magic respectively if the setting is in any way fantastical. If it isn't, it's probably one of the weirder school types not in the Extranormal Institute list like the School of Seduction or Clown College, and/or has a Wacky Homeroom if it's not a Wacky College. The Library will be at least well-stocked, and there's a chance it's a Great Big Library Of Everything.

Despite this, it's not always sunshine and roses. The villain(s) will attack the school if there are any, the Rival School will almost certainly be full of spoiled rotten over-privileged Jerks with Hearts of Jerk that put the Cool School's resident Jerk Jock and Alpha Bitch to shame (in the other way), and the homework is often brutal.

The Cool School is often a Boarding School but never an awful one (unless the villains have made a hostile takeover), and the protagonist will lament either often or on rare occasion about how much life at home sucks and they're much happier at the Cool School.

The Trope is often a Wish Fulfillment fantasy of the writer and almost always one of the fandom. Who wouldn't want to go to/have gone to this school? Even if it's dangerous, it's never the kind of place that treats you like National Student Database Entry #78956723567606 or just the $1,000,000,000,000 "donation" for a new school building, and what you learn there is going to be useful.

This is where you will find the Stranger in a Strange School, any schools which really are ordinary Boarding Schools but are in a City of Adventure, the normal Muggle public school that somehow manages to do its job well, and is the trope where you should list anything that doesn't fit under the normal examples of overlapping tropes but is definitely too awesome to be real.

The Extranormal Institutes often fall into this, including but not limited to those that give degrees in...

• Villain Ball Scholarships
• Gothic Social Studies
• Freelance Adventuring
• Sneaky Zen Masters Degree (for being one with the Life Energy)
• Fantasy Empire Leadership (when a tutor would do just as good a job)
• Tropology IN SPACE!
• Becoming Licensed to Kill people with Volcano Lairs on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (or is in the process of building one)
• Metahuman First Response Training
• Magical Doctorates

...unless they're the kind to avoid like the plague.

Examples of Cool School include:

Anime and Manga

• Train + Train takes place aboard a Cool Train High School. Needs More Love.
• Stellvia of the Universe: Stellvia is a Cool School in Space!

Comic Books

• Marvel Comics's Professor Charles Xavier founded the Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Mutatis Mutandis indeed.
• DC Comics has Mystik U.

Fan Works

• Camilla Sandman's Fanfiction University of Middle Earth is this trope where fanfic writers are taught to be better writers.
  • The spinoffs that are set in various fandoms are also this.

Film

• Brompton Academy is this in Young Sherlock Holmes.
• Miss. Grimwood's Finishing School for Girls is an all girl boarding school...Except that all the girls are monsters.

Literature

• The Trope Codifier is of course Harry Potter's Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the Wizarding School both in-universe and beyond.
• Ready Player One is more focused on the OASIS in general, though the protagonist, Wade Watts, starts out living in the stacks, a combination urban ghetto, third-world slum and trailer park, but attending school on the virtual planet Ludus. The planet has many carbon-copy school buildings and is as mundane as a school in virtual reality can get, though Ludus' schools do have a class dedicated to completing what is essentially the entire plot of the book.
• Wayside School is a thirty-story building, built sideways by an apologetic builder. It also has "no" Nineteenth Floor and the students and teachers are just as weird.
• The Miss. Cackle's Academy for Witches is a British all girls boarding school to teach them to become the best witch ever.

Tabletop Games

• Munchkin Spell Skool sets its furious back-stabbing, level-gaining action in a Wizarding School that is absolutely not Hogwarts. Honestly.
• Illuminati University from GURPS IOU is every kind of Cool School possible, all rolled into one extradimensional, non-Euclidean and somewhat sanity-damaging ball.

Video Games

• Psychonauts has Whispering Rock Summer Camp, where future Psychic Espionage Agents learn how to enter people's minds.

Western Animation

• Clone High is a cover for human cloning - for certain degrees of cover - but you do get to go to school with other famous historical figures.
• Tiny Toon Adventures mostly takes place at Acme Looniversity, which has classes for required hammerspace-related skills.
• Canterlot High School in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Spin-Off, My Little Pony: Equsetria Girls, is this.

Web Animation

• 16-bit High School is a school for video game characters.
• RWBY and its Spin-Off RWBY Chibi have Beacon Academy, where they train Huntsmen and Huntresses to fight The Grimm. Much vague referencing of fairy tales while fighting like a badass with anime style and flair ensues, as does Cerebus Syndrome.

Web Video

• Video Game High School takes place in a world where eSports are bigger than the FIFA World Cup, and the titular school teaches students to play video games at a professional level.

Other Media

• Bottle of Ruin Academy for Young Pirates ^[dead link] is too cool to be a fictional school, instead just a single image of a class schedule.

Real Life

• In the Navy, sailors learn to sail aboard Ships ^{[dead link]}. If you're thinking of writing about one and it isn't in space or otherwise not Like Reality Unless Noted, the real life "Ship Prefix" is... TS Name of Ship.
• Most Universities that are well known for their prestige and/or zany student pranks.
• If you went to college to get away from home, there's probably a bit of this in your mind.
  • On the school's side, a University does its' job properly when students learn to think for themselves. Contrast many grade schools and any University which isn't so good at doing its job.