More Info for College Students: Princeton Review Adding Sustainability Ratings to their College Rankings

The jury’s still out on whether college ratings provided by outlets like Newsweek and the U.S. News and World Report are actually helpful to students and their families. There have been a lot of questions about some of the statistics used to rank schools, and some colleges have been known to intentionally skew data to rank higher.

One way that these college rankings can be helpful to college students, however, is getting a feel for a school’s eco-friendliness via The Princeton Review’s new sustainability ratings. Beginning this year, you’ll be able to see a school’s ‘green rating’ in The Princeton Review’s annual college rankings.

From the Maneater:

The Princeton Review spokeswoman Harriet Brand said the “green rating” measures how well schools are using their environmental practices to deliver a better campus experience and to prepare students to succeed in their future careers.

The rating criteria includes how environmentally responsible a school’s policies are, whether students have a quality of life on campus that is both healthy and sustainable and how well a school is preparing its students for employment and for citizenship in a world defined by environmental challenges.

The data for the rating is based entirely on the 2007-2008 academic year.

Adding a rating like this to widely read rankings from the Princeton Review, which many prospective students and parents take very seriously, could be a great thing for the future of green practices in colleges. It could introduce a little competition into the sustainability practices at the schools highlighted in the issue. Students win, the environment wins – sounds good to us.

Link [The Maneater]

Photo credit: Flickr user katmere

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