In my two plus years that I have attended Quinnipiac—literally five percent of my life here on Earth—I have heard copious amounts of people lamenting, berating and insulting the “kind” of person that goes to school here. The word “Quinnipiac” brings forward certain connotations, including, but certainly not limited to: privileged, snobby, self-righteous and, dare I say, stuck-up.

Those sentiments may be accurate, for some, but labeling an entire sect of people is a dangerous thing to do; categorization of an entire group of people has rarely worked throughout history. You can categorize your comic book collection, but I would like to think the entire student population of a private university would be too diversified to categorize effectively.

So maybe I may be self-righteous writing this, maybe I am a snob, but here are some facts; statistics do not always paint the truest picture, but they are much more persuasive than any combination of words I could ever type.

University primetime, a popular online website, announced on Aug. 18 that Quinnipiac is the safest university in the United States for the second year in a row. The rankings, according to the website, were based on student deaths on campus, number of student arrests on and off campus, as well as any other “digging” that the site could perform.

Now this stat is not decisive, and there are absolutely imperfections to the way that the ranking was obtained, but it does say something about the type of people who attend our school; we are somewhat humane to one another.

I’m sure that very few students at other schools would feel safe leaving their laptops in the school library. I have often left my laptop unattended in the library, only to come back and see it exactly where I left it. I am sure that some administrators or faculty reading this are probably about to tear the newspaper in half at the former comment, but it is almost an unwritten rule at Quinnipiac that you just don’t take someone else’s things.

Someone who is self-righteous or snobby would not have the moral aptitude to comprehend that stealing is morally and socially incorrect.

In addition to the safe environment, which is a somewhat telling, but possibly hazy reflection of the type of student that attends Quinnipiac, the financial background of many students is very far from being privileged.

I will not deny that many people here may be, at the very least, the child of a family sitting firmly in the middle class. That being said, very few students are so privileged that their family is outright paying for their college education.

According to collegecalc.org, students at Quinnipiac are charged approximately $54,000 (that actually hurt to type that). Seventy-six percent of students then receive approximately $15,000 worth of grant aid to help lower the cost of tuition. In addition to this, 12 percent of students receive some form of federal student aid.

Sure there may be some students here who come from families possessing the financial strength to pay for college in full, without the aid of loans or grants, but the majority of students do understand the sacrifice their families are making in some way or another.

It is easy to say that students do not understand the value of a dollar, but then again, not many 18 to 21-year-olds do, let’s face it.

So maybe I am jumping on the Bobcat bandwagon, or maybe I am missing out on something that everybody else knows and I am unaware of, but I would like to think that there is a certain moral character in the Quinnipiac community that is much different, and actually completely opposite, of what the normal stereotype seems to be.