The Princeton Review – known for its education services helping students choose and get in to colleges – today reported its fourth annual Green Ratings of colleges: a measure of how environmentally friendly the institutions are on a scale of 60 to 99. The Company tallied the rating for 768 institutions based on its institutional surveys of colleges in 2010-11 concerning their environmentally related practices, policies and academic offerings.
The Green Rating scores appear in the profiles of the 768 schools that The Princeton Review today posted on http://www.PrincetonReview.com. They are also in the profiles of those schools in the new 2012 editions of two Princeton Review guidebooks: “The Best 376 Colleges” ($22.99) and “Complete Book of Colleges” ($26.99) – on sale August 2, published by Random House.
The Princeton Review also today named 16 colleges to its “2012 Green Rating Honor Roll” – a list of colleges that received the highest possible score (99) in its Green Rating tallies this year. Published in “The Best 376 Colleges” guidebook and on the Company’s website, the list includes:
(in alphabetical order)
American University (Washington DC)
Arizona State University (Tempe)
College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor ME)
Dickinson College (Carlisle PA)
Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta)
Harvard College (Cambridge MA)
Northeastern University (Boston MA)
Oregon State University (Corvallis)
San Francisco State University (San Francisco CA)
State University of New York – Binghamton University
University of California – Santa Cruz
University of Maine (Orono)
University of Washington (Seattle)
University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point
Virginia Tech (Blacksburg VA)
Warren Wilson College (Asheville NC)
Said Robert Franek, Princeton Review Senior VP / Publisher, “We commend theadministrators, faculty and students at the schools on our Green Rating Honor Roll for theirexemplary commitments to the environment. Also, we thank the 768 institutions that supplied us with data we requested to tally their Green Rating scores this year. We are pleased to play a role in helping students identify, apply to, and get into these schools.”
Franek noted the rising interest among students in attending green colleges. Among 8,200 college applicants The Princeton Review surveyed this year for its annual “College Hopes & Worries Survey,” 69% said having information about a college’s commitment to the environment would impact their decision to apply to or attend a school.
Criteria for Princeton Review’s Green Rating cover three areas: 1/ whether the school’s students have a campus quality of life that is healthy and sustainable, 2/ how well the school is preparing its students for employment and citizenship in a world defined by environmental challenges, and 3/ the school’s overall commitment to environmental issues.
The institutional survey for the rating included questions on energy use, recycling, food, buildings, and transportation as well as academic offerings and action plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Princeton Review developed its Green Rating with ecoAmerica (http://www.ecoamerica.org), a non-profit environmental organization, in 2007-08.
The Princeton Review dedicated a resource area on its site http://www.princetonreview.com/green for students interested in attending a green college. There, users can also download “The Princeton Review’s Guide to 311 Green Colleges: 2011 Edition” – the only free, comprehensive guidebook to the nation’s most environmentally responsible colleges. The 220-page guide is a project The Princeton Review has done for two years in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council (www.usgbc.org). Published April 20, it has profiles of schools that received scores in the 80th or higher percentile in the Company’s 2010 tallies for its Green Ratings. The guide can be downloaded at www.princetonreview.com/green-guide.aspx or at www.centerforgreenschools.org/greenguide
