Party school. Safety school. Easy acceptance. Back-up plan.

All of these are common descriptions of Arizona State University (ASU) , the college that I will be attending next year. It’s a state school, certainly not anywhere near as prestigious as some of the schools my friends are going to. I’ve heard tales of high school seniors filling out the application in five minutes on a whim and still getting in. Despite this, I’m proud to be going there. I’m proud because it’s the school that’s perfect for me and a community that I’m genuinely excited to be a part of.

I’ll admit, I haven’t had the best high school career. I got high test scores, but my transcript leaves much to be desired. I know I wouldn’t have been able to get into a lot of the schools my friends applied to, but I’m okay with that. All I ask is that I receive the same kind of recognition for finding the school of my dreams as the people who are going to top-tier private schools.

Six years ago, my older sister announced that she would be going to UC Berkeley, one of the top-ranked public schools in the country. Everyone was extremely proud of her and didn’t hesitate to tell her so. “Congrats, you’re a rockstar!” wrote one person on her Facebook wall, amidst a dozen other posts of the same sentiment.

Fast forward six years to when I made the decision to commit to ASU in October, and I got a far different response. People did and still continue to question my decision, telling me that I’m “settling” or that it’s “the wrong fit.” Sure, going to UC Berkeley is definitely something to be proud of. But so is me finding the school that I’ll be happiest at.

It’s not a realistic expectation to think that everyone will be able to go to the same 30 top-ranked schools that get thousands of qualified applicants each year. This year, UCLA received more than 97,000 applications from incoming freshmen, competing for approximately 5,680 spots. In 2015, Columbia University had 36,250 applicants competing for 2,222 spots, a 6.1% admission rate.

Each year, English teacher Jane Woodman includes a college and career unit in her 11th grade IB English class. As she explains, college admissions is like a parking lot. There can be thousands of cars that want to get into the lot, but there are only so many spots. We don’t look down on people who can’t find a space in a parking lot, so why should we look down on people who aren’t going to those colleges?

Besides this, a lot of people don’t even want to go to those schools. There are lots of factors that play into the college decision besides prestige: cost, location and programs available. Even if I had been eligible to get into an Ivy, I wouldn’t have considered it because I don’t want to be that far from home. There’s so much more that goes into a college than its name, and we need to start looking past the name and seeing how great every college is in its own right. I chose ASU because of its journalism program, its community and the feel of the campus, not because of its name.

I’m not by any means saying that we shouldn’t congratulate our friends and our peers who are going to top-tier, competitive universities. But why should that take away from the pride that students who are going to state schools, community colleges, or forgoing college all together are entitled to feel? Graduating high school is a huge accomplishment in itself, and the competition surrounding to college decision process shouldn’t detract from that.

The dialogue surrounding college decisions should be one of pride and congratulations, not one of competition and shame. All seniors have the right to feel proud of where they’re going and know that their peers and their community are proud of them too.