Princeton Review Adds Environmental Rating

In addition to scores that gauge political candidates, cars, and household appliances, environmental friendliness is now also a factor considered in the 2009 edition of the Princeton Review’s 368 Best Colleges book to be released this summer.

The April 22 announcement comes after 63 percent of the 10,300 respondents to the Princeton Review’s annual “College Hopes & Worries Survey” said that “they would value having information about a college’s commitment to the environment and that it may impact their decision to apply to or attend the school.”

The new “Green Rating”—based on the environmental friendliness of the college’s policies, health and sustainablity on campus, and how well the college prepares students to live in an environmentally conscious world—will be applied to 600 schools this year.

The rating, produced on a scale of 60 to 90, is formulated from 28 survey questions designed to judge these three environmental factors.

EcoAmerica, a non-profit environmental organization, helped develop the questionnaire for the Princeton Review and collect the data from the 2007-2008 academic year.

“It’s in everybody’s best interest to be more committed to ecology,” Director of Public Relations for the Princeton Review Harriet Brand said. “You’re not going to have much of a career if there’s no planet.”

Harvard’s Environmental Action Committee Chair Amy P. Heinzerling ’08 said the Review’s move would aid in future sustainability efforts.

“I’m glad to see that the Princeton Review is expanding their

focus to include environmental concerns, and I think it will help put these issues on students’ radars,” she said.

While Heinzerling said that a quantitative score can only do so much, she added that it could spur colleges and universities to expand their green initiatives.

“Hopefully this will also

serve as a positive motivator for colleges to do more environment-friendly things,” she said.