The Morgendorffers embark on a road trip/animal-running-over-session to visit their friends, Doug and Susan, whose 3-year-old daughter, Ramona, is learning to read from college-prep books. The reason for this, they convey to Jake and Helen, is that getting into college is comparable to a several-years-long gauntlet, and they want Ramona to get a head start (no kidding). They then ask Helen and Jake what they're doing to make sure that Daria and Quinn get into a good school.

Helen is, of course, overcome with embarrassment at the fact that they have done nothing, so she enrolls her daughters in Push Comes to Love, a college-prep course. There they get taught many useful things such a how to eliminate two of the answers on a multiple-choice test - well, actually, they're supposed to be learning this, but they really daydream about what college will be like. Then they fill out a paper (Daria's can be seen in The Daria Diaries), and are told that they must visit a college of their choosing and see what its like to be a student there.

Helen and Jake choose to make them visit Middleton, their old college, where they are met by maroon-haired Heather, a college student and their guide. She tells them about the college for a while, while Jake (complete with two pairs of glasses - both on strings - hanging around his neck) makes completely futile attempts to bond with male college students, eventually gets hit by a water balloon, and discovers that it came from his old dorm room. So, Jake and Helen go to see "the old cell," leaving Daria and Quinn with Heather. Quinn manages to convince some people that she's a fraternity member, and Daria and Heather leave her at the fraternity and head for Heather's dorm.

There, Daria discovers that college is pretty much like high school, only worse (is that possible?), and that basically all that Heather and her roomates do is sit around watching TV. However, right before "Sick, Sad World" starts, Heather gets a package: her term paper. She lets Daria read it and correct it for ten dollars, and soon Daria has a long line of students waiting for her "help".

Meanwhile, Helen has finally discovered that the girls are missing, and starts frantically searching for them. Unfortunately, her method of searching frantically involves trying to flirt with a poor freshman and getting asked for her underwear by a frat geek, who thinks that they will be quite big enough to be seen from the school when they are proudly flying on his fraternity's flagpole. Jake has been called into some executive's office to review college payments, and seems about to have a heart-attack because of the colossal tuition fees. He finds Helen, and they agree to enlist the help of the campus police in finding Daria and Quinn.

Heather eventually gets bored of waiting around for Daria to write papers for brain-dead students, so she suggests going to a frat party. This party just happens to be the one that Quinn was at, and Heather and Daria find that Quinn has been crowned Keg Queen. Soon after this, Helen, Jake, and the cops show up, and the Morgendorffers have to get escorted off campus, as its illegal for minors to attend frat parties (not to mention getting crowned Keg Queen).

Push Comes to Love meets one more time, and in this meeting, all the students tell about their college experiences. When Daria gets home, she finds a shocking scene: the family in the living room together. It turns out that Quinn has been accepted to Manatee College, which, Daria discovers from reading the bottom of the paper, has no classes, but rather offers beach-front accomodations at only $10,000 a semester! Just as Jake and Helen are recovering from this revelation, the frat geek who asked Helen for her underwear comes to pay Daria for writing his paper, and Daria's source of supplemental income is discovered. Helen gets mad about her encouraging and profiting from cheaters, and doesn't let Daria keep any of the money, so she ends up broke.

At the end, Daria and Jane decide that though they hope that there are better years in their lives than their teens, these years do have their choice moments, such as Quinn throwing her soda into the Push Comes to Love instructor's face.