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I have never understood the notion of college rankings. It is unfortunate that so many people relate a school’s ranking to the potential held within for prospective students. Ranking can only express what is statistically measurable. Students’ experiences cannot be reduced to quantitative measures alone. Assuming so would be as absurd as assuming we understand the life of an individual by only looking at their outward actions. For what use is it, simply to aim at some objective external good, without paying any attention to the internal feelings and the virtues of the institution’s character?
It has oft been repeated that what is most important is not any “objective” standard of the abstract notion of “goodness” in respectto a college so much as it is important to understand that one should find the college that “best fits” one’s personality. Like all clichés, this particular one holds within itself a grain of truth: it is often the case that colleges are geared toward certain personalities. However, it is similarly incorrect to presuppose that we might know beforehand, using quantitative measures, what college is a “best fit” for us; only by means of experience may we come to any such conclusions. Moreover, it is completely foolhardy to suppose that, at the age of matriculation, we should have developed a solid sense of “self” to which we should think ourselves to faithfully adhere. The tragedy of life is not contained in the knowledge that people change; it is, rather, to be found in the fear that they may stay the same.
A college is not college in respect to any notion of “academic quality,” nor of the “quality” of one’s professors, nor of one’s peers. A college is a college in respect to the experiences one undergoes and how these moments shape the individual’s character in turn. Truly, it is the accumulation of experiences that makes college worthwhile. No one college monopolizes the totality of beneficial experiences. Allinstitutions of higher education provide limitless potential for their students to be molded through experiences. Too much forethought and planning about ones future alma mater hinders the faculty of free choice and individual will. It closes our minds off to new experiences simply because they are new and denies us the opportunities which life has afforded us. Life is complex, and who knows what possibilities lie before you like a sea of dreams – and your choice of college is but one small drop in the deep blue infinitude.
To those of you who did not receive the nod of approval from your first choice school: try not to dwell on the opportunities you might have encountered at the school measured in red brick and entangled ivy. Relinquish your frustration, and prepare for a series of experiences that are immeasurable in nature. And for those of you who are not yet consoled, who have resolved to be bitter and weep over your misfortune that you were overlooked at one place or another – cease from your lacrimation, for tears and bitter sorrow impede the development of character. Those who allow themselves to be ruled by such accidental happenstance will never make a human out of a negative disposition, for the free life is manifest in how one responds to contingencies and not how one controls them.
Short of the Divine, all human things are temporal and imperfect: “King and Philosophers defecate, and so do Ladies.” Institutions likewise are afflicted with shortcomings, regardless of their rank. Some of us may, with all pomp and circumstance, cloak ourselves with the immaterial substance of “prestige,” but remember that behind the cloak, we are naught but naked and shivering animals, struggling to make an order out of a world fundamentally disarrayed. In other words, regardless of the rank of ones alma mater the only thing of consequence is the result. Should you ever think that you have missed the mark, remember that the fundamental Human Good is that of happiness. Happiness is a free spirit who shall not allow herself to be controlled by human institutions but hovers and flits above and about us – we should seize her with no delay, if only we should want it! Only turn your eyes skyward, for the Good is latent within everybody!
Remember Socrates, grave in death! He needed no academy to live well; he needed no school to teach him virtue, but rather, he unfolded from within himself what knowledge he could only believe was divinely given! Remember the equanimity with which he faced death, how calmly he of hemlock drunk – how his last words represented the soul of a man, forever defiant. If he could face death with such ease, then do you therefore please to face the vagaries and vicissitudes of life with joy, cheer and insuperable vivacity?
