<p>I’d like to address this question, and if you like how I handle the topic, I deplore you to send the message to friends and other threads so that hopefully my message can get out.</p>
<p>I used to do this, obsess about numbers and different figures. Who has the higher SAT scores between these schools? What about yield rates? Oh, and the ACT, what about those? I don’t anymore, and not because this data isn’t important because to some VERY LIMITED extent it is. I will explain myself further, but the most important thing to do first is understand where these questions come from. They all arise from the central concern of finding the best college. What college is the best?</p>
<p>I’ve found that the people who ask this question all come from the same group: people who do not understand how college education functions. Perhaps they’ve never experienced college so they don’t know or they’re so far removed that they’ve forgotten. Let us refresh our memories: A college education is much more than what your GPA reflects. Doing well in class is important, but I strongly doubt that anyone in the history of mankind can say they learned everything they needed in life from within a lecture hall or a classroom. College education extends beyond the classroom. You learn how to live without parents or strict guidance, how to defend your morals, and you also learn how to expand yourself mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually, and physically–or in whatever other way you are inclined to expand yourself (musically, athletically, etc…). This is a college education; this is what college is supposed to do.</p>
<p>Now I want to be extremely clear on this point because it is central to my argument. College is a place where you can learn and expand yourself intellectually, emotionally, socially, spiritually, etc. </p>
<p>The question now shifts entirely. “What is the best college?” can be turned into “What is the best place where you can learn and expand yourself in every way?” THIS IS THE QUESTION!!! How mad must we be to believe that there is a universal answer to this question that can be rendered through data analysis? Yet, I see dozens of threads celebrating a school when it becomes “top 10” or breaks “top 5”. </p>
<p>We have become a nation that dare to say a child would be going to a better college if they attended Harvard instead of Boston University (two random schools). We must return to way of thinking that allows us to believe that no school is better than the other. We must stop seeking the best college and go back to looking for the right college. These polls, in my opinion, give us a piece to the puzzle of finding the RIGHT school for us. My best friend goes to Providence College, and I go to Duke. I would say Duke is the better school, yes, but Duke is not the better college. Not for my best friend at least. Duke is the right college for me. I have experienced and learned more than I could imagine, just the same way my best friend has done at Providence. The truth is a student from UChicago could go to Duke and get a better college education and vice versa. This doesn’t mean that one college is better than the other. It means that the student found a better place where he/she could expand himself/herself. </p>
<p>There is no best school, not for everyone. There is only the right school, and there is a right school for everyone. These rankings, these figures, they only provide a small part of the bigger picture. That is how we should treat all this data, as pieces to a bigger whole that we ourselves must put together to find our number one school.</p>
<p>Harpoon me if you want. Call me an idealist, perhaps you’re right. What I can tell you with certainty though, and with my right hand to God, is that I would never change what school I go to because not a single other school can make me smile like Duke can. There isn’t a college in the world where I feel that I belong so much to a community the way I feel at Duke. This is because Duke is the right school for me. For that reason, Duke is number one in my book. I don’t need a magazine that annually publishes a slightly different list from the year before just so they can move inventory to tell me that my school isn’t the best school for me. Everyone should be able to say that they go to a number one school, and if they don’t, then it’s time to transfer because there is your number one school out there. It just might not be at the top of a webpage.</p>