Princeton Review’s Green College Ratings to Debut This Summer

College students everywhere now have a new guide to choosing the right school: the Princeton Review, a popular annual guide for college students to gain information about schools, now includes ‘green ratings’. The 2009 guide is set to be published later this month. Other factors ranked by the Princeton Review for the 600 colleges included in its guide include everything from financial aid to selectivity to quality of life.

From GreenBiz.com:

The Review added the green dimension to its ratings system after it found that 63 percent of college applicants surveyed said they would value having information about a college’s commitment to the environment and that such data could affect their choice to apply or attend a school.

The green rating is based on responses to a battery of questions that are designed to provide a comprehensive measure of a school’s performance as an “environmentally aware and responsible institution,” the Review said on its website.

What an awesome resource – this is definitely something that more and more college students want to know about. It could also foster some competition between schools to get greener, and of course we LOVE that! Exciting time to be entering college.

Link [GreenBiz.com]

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