Back in the summer, the Princeton Review delivered its Green Rating of US colleges – a measure of how environmentally friendly such institutions are. Ranging from 60 to 99, the Green Rating ranks over 500 colleges and it’s an important measure for many students. 63% of the 10,300 also surveyed by Princeton Review said that it was important to know a college’s environmental credentials when deciding where to study. But what about the students themselves – how green are they?
The student stereotype of party animal stupidity when not in lectures seems to have changed, and the current recession is forcing change even faster. The Fall intake of students spent around $600 each on new clothing – when the same students return to college early in 2009, after spending Christmas at home, most of them are saying they won’t be buying any new clothing at all, because they won’t have the money. Instead they are hoping family will come through with clothing gifts to get them through the next semester.
Green Students Share Washing Machines
So how are the suddenly budget-conscious youngsters faring when it comes to cutting their carbon budget?
Many have learned to turn down the hot-water heater, to use lower temperature washes in the laundry and to line-dry their clothes. Others are taking their own mugs to coffee-shops to avoid the waste of paper cups and plastic lids. Some have developed community brown-bag schemes that link locally grown food to student kitchens where volunteers take it in turns to brown-bag for dozens of hungry freshmen.
Other techniques that can save money and the planet include avoiding the standby option on computers, and other devices, instead turning systems off at the mains when not in use, carpooling, and ensuring that students never have less than a full load of laundry when they run the machine.
Top Green Colleges in the USA
Meantime, for avid green students, the 11 American colleges that each received Green Rating scores of 99 – the highest possible mark issued by the Princeton Review survey – are, alphabetically:
· Arizona State University (Tempe campus)
· Bates College (Lewiston, ME)
· Binghamton University (State Univ. of New York at Binghamton)
· College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME)
· Emory University (Atlanta, GA)
· Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA)
· Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
· University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH)
· University of Oregon (Eugene, OR)
· University of Washington (Seattle, WA)
· Yale University (New Haven, CT)
Green jobs photograph courtesy of greenforall.org at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence. It shows students at Wesleyan in Middletown, CT, who responded to the the Environmental Organizers Network (EON) call to sign a petition online and take a picture with an “I’m Ready!” sign to show their desire for “green’ jobs.
Good job. Keep it real.
Kudo to the colleges and their students.