The Orbis

Issue date: 10/2/07 Section: Opinion

I found out first hand that campus guidebooks can seriously distort one's perspective of campus life. The bright yellow "College Prowler" guidebooks are arranged neatly in a three-tiered display shelf sitting prominently near the entrance of the Vanderbilt bookstore. Opening one at random, I was surprised to find page after page of strange, anonymous quotes from Vanderbilt students (who knows how current) expounding on every aspect of campus life.

I browsed through various college guides and websites during my own college search (those Princeton Review Top 10 lists are highly addictive when you're a second-semester senior), but it was an odd feeling to be a fairly new college student and reading weird rumors about your university while standing in said university's bookstore.

This was early in my freshman year at Vanderbilt and since then I have had more time to evaluate campus culture and dynamics for myself. Any current Vanderbilt student most likely recalls hearing some strange and mysterious "facts" about the school prior to or shortly after arriving on campus. Rumors abound regarding every aspect of campus life, from fashion trends to racial interaction, the party scene to the political climate, the "dirt" on dorms to the economic disparities between students.

While some of these pithy statements do hold truth, many are perpetuated by college guides using false (at worst) or biased (at best) "statistics" about Vanderbilt. Taking into consideration these "insider looks" at colleges along with the proliferation of rankings, lists, and every other compilation of facts you can imagine about a university, there is an overwhelming range of information to wade through in search of an accurate profile of a college. It might be helpful to prospective students to use these to get a sense of a school's atmosphere, but these guidebook rankings actually hold back the university.

The most recent and disturbing rating Vanderbilt received was its high placement among The Princeton Review's Schools with Little Race/Class Interaction. Though many Vanderbilt students would agree that Vanderbilt is weak in this area, is it really beneficial to compile these sorts of rankings? Such lists easily become excuses for continuing negative behavior. These types of quantifications of campus life raise the question of which comes first: the ranking or the atmosphere? Obviously, there must be some attitudes and general mores present on campus before students come to agreement about a general atmosphere, but one must wonder whether college rankings actually perpetuate negative stereotypes on campus.

Continued...

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