With April Welcome and the emergence of potential freshmen on our campus, the question of which college is the best to attend always crops up.

As many of us take part in selling our school to our visitors, we constantly find ourselves comparing ourselves to Harvard (we’re the Harvard of the Midwest) and other schools that have higher U.S. News & World Report rankings.

We say things like, “Well, we have the third-ranked medical school and our pre-med program is one of the best,” or “We recently hired some big shot economics professors, so we’re going to be on par with better-known programs.”

We’re right to praise our academic strengths, but often times we stop there when thinking about the benefits of attending our particular institution. Yet, there are educational benefits to the Wash. U. experience that come from not being the top-ranked academic university in the country. We tend to ignore the educational advantages we gain from not being Harvard, Princeton, Yale and all of the schools that we constantly imply are better than Wash. U.

Let me backtrack a moment.

A few months ago, I was talking with a member of the school improvement team from my high school, Millard South. We were trying to figure out how to renovate the Advanced Placement (AP) program in order to set the brightest students up for greater success.

I said that in my experience it seemed like schools that had more successful AP programs implemented some sort of tracking, either by being private and only admitting students of a certain caliber or through tracking students into different levels of classes through their high school experience.

The school improvement team member asked whether I thought tracking students would provide an educational benefit that would make up for the experiences students would gain through being in completely mixed classes in a public high school. In the end, we nixed the idea of tracking students by intellectual ability.

Wash. U. is quite obviously not my public high school. We’re tracked ability-wise through the admissions process, so we don’t have the benefit of attending classes with a bunch of different people, many of whom are not focused on academics. But, we do have the advantage of studying on a campus that isn’t constantly invaded by tourists.

We have a reasonable expectation that if we want to start up a game of ultimate frisbee outside of Olin Library, we’ll be able to do so.

There’s something to be said for attending a school that can make at least some decisions about how it operates without having to consider how the national media will react.

There’s even something to be said for telling people you go to Wash. U. and having them ask you how you like living in the capital or the Northwest.

The benefit to the privacy, the ambiguous name and our position outside the center of the media is that this school can genuinely be about us.

I know sometimes it doesn’t seem like the Wash. U. experience is about students.

When the school hires researchers over lecturers and raises tuition, we feel like the school is only concerned with itself.

And sometimes that’s probably true. But a lot of times Wash. U. will make changes based on what students want. Wash. U. recently embraced mixed-gender housing largely because it was something students wanted, and we’ve been able to make this progress without worrying about the opinion of the rest of the country. (Students at Harvard are still pushing for this change.)

As students, we have a real ability to shape the policies and dynamic of our University; we can shape what it means to go to Wash. U.

And this is a type of empowerment we can’t quantify for magazine rankings.

Jill is a junior in Arts & Sciences and a Forum editor. She can be reached via e-mail at forum@studlife.com.

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