<p>I attend a college that was ranked top 10 in Princeton Review’s “Best Value Public Colleges.” I was forced to transfer there because of many factors (money, naturally, being the biggest one). I’m very happy that I did. At my old college, where my scholarship covered only half of the tuition, I was under constant guilt that such big money (both mine and my parents’) must be spent just for the sake of the institution’s name. The individualized attention that I was supposed to be getting felt more like spoon feeding me what I already knew. The purported diversity was mostly ethnic: while the majority of students did come from different parts of the world, most of them were from well-to-do families and their maturity level was that of preteens.</p>
<p>Compared to my previous educational institutions, my current one feels like an inner-city school. Yet I have been getting all the attention I needed from my professors. All you need to do is to know how to approach them both inside and outside the classroom.</p>
<p>A good number of my classmates have to work to survive. Some speak really good English with the thickest of accents. A few are twice my age. A couple already have kids. I feel more comfortable among them than I ever did at my fancy parochial school and well-respected college.</p>
<p>It’s true that I’m missing the typical college experience: I come to class, and then I leave. Do I regret it? Not a single bit. New York City is my campus, and that’s good enough for me. I have those things that I used to call extracurriculars not so long ago; does it really matter that they have nothing to do with my college?</p>