Ready? Set. RANK!

There are several sustainability rankings for universities that are universally used for comparison. The first is the College Sustainability Report Card at greenreportcard.org. This ranking is made on a 4.0 scale. The highest score for the 2010 report card was an A-. The following schools ranked overall an A- and had an A in the categories of Recycling and Food, Transportation, and Student Involvement. Each of these Universities and many more have their surveys posted online. This provides incite on the common sustainable practices and goals to the general public.

Arizona State University- Temple
Brown University
University of California- San Diego
Carleton College
University of Colorado
Middlebury College
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Oberlin College
Pacific Lutheran University
University of Pennsylvania
Pomona College
Smith College
Stanford University
Williams College
Yale University

The next popular rankings cite is the Sierra Club. This organization is the “most influential grassroots organization in the United States.” They rank sustainable universities by the following eight categories: efficiency, energy, food, administration, purchasing, transportation, waste, and administration. Their top ten universities and colleges are (in order of rank):

A+   1) University of Colorado
A+   2) University of Washington
A+   3) Middlebury College
A+   4) University of Vermont
A+   5) College of the Atlantic
A+   6) Evergreen State College
A     7) University of California, Santa Cruz
A     8) University of California, Berkeley
A     9) UCLA
A    10) Oberlin College

The Princeton Review is known for helping prospective students select and get into a school, and because of the growing desire for sustainability in a university, they came out with a Green Honor Roll. The Green Honor Roll measures how “environmentally friendly” a school is. Surveys for this ranking were developed with ecoAmerica and are considerably shorter than the College Sustainability Report. For 2010, 697 schools were surveyed and 371 were published in the three Princeton Review books. The following schools are the top 15, all with the highest possible score of 99:

Arizona State University at the Tempe campus
Bates College (Lewiston ME)
Binghamton University (State Univ. of New York at Binghamton)
College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor ME)
Colorado College (Colorado Springs CO)
Dickinson College (Carlisle PA)
Evergreen State College (Olympia WA)
Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta)
Harvard College (Cambridge MA)
Middlebury College (Middlebury VT)
Northeastern University (Boston MA)
University of California - Berkeley University of New Hampshire (Durham)
University of Washington (Seattle)
Yale University (New Haven CT)

After reviewing these surveys and comparing them with Texas A&M's benchmark schools, I will post a best practices report. This report will be the basis for the surveys I will conduct with students here at Texas A&M.