Dani Blum | Give up the numbers game

The Danalyst | Why we need to stop talking about Penn’s place in the Ivy League

By Dani Blum 09/15/14 10:58pm

W e ’r e number one. Or at least College Fac tual thinks so. Ask U.S. News and World Report and they’ll tell you Penn’s number eight; ask them a year ago, and we’re seven.

Rankings shouldn’t matter, but as members of the Ivy League, we feel obligated to validate ourselves at every opportunity. It’s difficult to ignore a number ranking — where else can we find a concrete measure of how “good” we are? Our student body is insanely competitive, and we channel that combative streak towards other colleges. We want confirmation we’re the best, even though The Princeton Review might never realize it.

The real reason we pay attention to rankings, though, is because the Penn student body has an inferiority complex. Maybe it comes from constantly assuring our grandparents that we don’t go to Penn State, but so many of us feel the need to justify Penn’s worth to ourselves. During NSO, after the standard, “Where are you from?,” “What are you studying?,” “Yeah, I didn’t get into the Quad, either,” intros, the next question was typically, “Where else were you choosing between?”

The resulting conversatio n was a comparison of Penn against the other Ivies — “You’ve got Harvard, Yale and Princeton, and then we’re a solid fourth, right guys?” — and verbal pats on the back — “I didn’t get into Stanford either, but hey, all’s well that ends well.” I’ve also walked into several conversations over the past three weeks about how “Penn’s prestige is definitely on the rise,” and, “In 20 years, we’ll be more popular than Yale.”

These statements seem like a mix between ego boosts and self-deprecations. We remind ourselves we go to a fantastic school, but we put ourselves down for being one of “the lower Ivies,” as I overheard someone refer to Brown and Penn. We use Penn as an ego boost, but we’re not satisfied. Even in our school song, we call out “Fair Harvard” and “Old Yale.” Measuring ourselves against other schools just wastes time, though. It’s not productive, or interesting or even fun. Talking about rankings just fills the air with noise; it doesn’t accomplish anything, or do anything to boost Penn’s reputation.

If we really want to change the way the rest of the world perceives Penn, we could devote our energies to making Penn a more respected school. Let’s give Amy Gutmann more to brag about instead of shortchanging ourselves out of habit.

Maybe what bothers me so much about concerns with Penn’s reputation is that they ignore so much of what defines our school. The overwhelming majority of us wanted to go to a “good” college, but there’s more to Penn than its prestige. Roughly half of my class — including myself — applied Early Decision because we saw that uniqueness. Penn was more than a school in the top 10 or an Ivy — it was a place where we knew we’d feel at home. I couldn’t find another campus with the same life force as Penn, with the pulse of energy that comes from walking down lit-up Locust at night or that tug of pride we feel from being the social Ivy. Our school is so bustling and dynamic that we can’t condense it to a number. If we could, it wouldn’t be dear old Penn.

We spend so much time focused on what other people think about Penn that we don’t consider our own opinions. The fact is, we still have choices. If we don’t love our school, we can transfer. But if we do — and I’m confident most of us are in this category — we need to stop trying to make it something it’s not. No, we don’t have the instant recognition of other Ivies. But we should n’t need that. We all went through the competitive admissions process — we know how lucky we are to wear the Red and Blue . We can prattle off arguments about Penn’s prestige to people back home, but w e don’t need that here. Stop justifying Penn to Pe nn.

Dani Blum is a College freshman from Ridgefield, Conn. Her email address is kblum@sas.upenn.edu. “The Danalyst” appears every Tuesday.

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