Jul 28 2008

Colleges Chasing New "Greenest" Ranking

The Princeton Review's annual college guide is due out this week and will publish its first "green rating" for environmentally friendly schools. The Sunday New York Times carried a lengthy piece yesterday on green campuses in its Education Life section and got a peek at the top-ranked green schoools: Arizona State, Bates, Binghamton University, College of the Atlantic, Harvard, Emory, Georgia Institute of Technology, Yale, and the Universities of New Hampshire, Oregon and Washington.

Schools will get points for things like "environmentally prefereable food," renewable power sources and energy-efficient buildings, the Times says. A college's green image is important. A Princeton Review survey of 10,300 college applicants found that 63 percent said a school's commitment to the enviornment could affect their decision to go there.

Colleges are working to be carbon neutral, hiring sustainability coordinators and competing in buying clean power supplies. In an Environmental Protection Agency contest among athletic conferences, the Ivy League finished first with a combined 221.6 million kilowatt hours for the quarter ending in April.

Some skeptics, however, say schools are chasing headlines more than reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

"I don't think we really have the tools to quantifiably test who's doing the best and who's not," says David W. Oxtoby, president of Pomona College. "It becomes a publicity hype type of thing."

Posted by: Leonard Anderson | Comments (0) digg delicioussend to a friendprint entry

 

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Climate Change , Community , Efficiency , Environment , Sustainable

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