Note to CCers about Duke

p_hp_fan
Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:56:05 +0000

Haha, “Come to Duke first and realize that the difference in these perceived ‘differences’ in schools is miniscule and negligible.” That’s extremely true. While there are significant differences between universities, those differences are usually in insignificant places–or at least not where you might expect. For example, Duke has an all-freshman campus. That is really different, but it doesn’t make Duke a “better” or “worse” school in any sense that I can think of. I liked it, but…it’s not like I can’t envision an alternative setup that wouldn’t work just as well. The things that are really going to define your life at Duke cannot even begin to be captured by something like USNWR–it’s the small, arbitrary, and often unpredictable things that give a university its character. That said, I kind of have a problem with you (John) calling Duke great without even experiencing it (assuming you don’t live in Durham, etc.). How do you know it’s great? I hope not because USNWR told you so. Some people come to Duke and hate it and transfer (or hate it and don’t transfer). Some people hate it their freshman year and love it for the rest of their time.

In a way, CC and USNWR remind me of the game maffia. The (simplified) premise of the game is that you’re supposed to figure out who is the maffia and who isn’t–but you have no evidence to go on! Because there’s usually no way to even begin to make an educated guess about who’s who, people usually just start making up very shaky evidence–just so they have something to go on. For example, “they’re blinking too much, they must be in the maffia.” People who’ve played the game know that a lot of times these arbitrary “reasons” are wrong and you end up killing the townspeople accidentally.

The game is similar to college selection and what makes a college “great”. It’s really difficult to ever know if a college experience was “great”. For example, after my freshman year I thought Duke was just a mediocre place. I liked it OK but wouldn’t dare to call it “great”. But after my sophomore year, I thought Duke was an incredible place. Maybe next year I’ll think it’s dull again. But if it’s hard to tell whether or not a place is great after being there even for a year, then using USNWR rankings without even ever experiencing the place is like trying to grasp for reasons when you don’t really have any. Calling Duke great because it ranked 10th on USNWR is similar to saying you’re the maffia because you’re blinking too much–you’re basically inventing reasons out of your true lack for any.