Earth Equity News

'Green' Report Cards for Colleges. By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, CSMonitor, July 8, 2008. "Students looking to narrow their college choices will soon have something new to consider alongside academics and campus life: A 'Green Rating' makes its debut this summer in several of The Princeton Review'spopular college guides. Six-hundred college profiles will include a score reflecting factors such as building and transportation policies, food sources, recycling, and availability of environmental courses... The College Sustainability Report Card, put out by the Sustainable Endowments Institute (SEI) in Cambridge, Mass., gives letter grades to at least 200 public and private schools with the largest endowments. In addition to green campus factors, it grades how well a school uses its investment leverage to advocate for the environment. 'When people are comparing schools that all say they are leaders on sustainability… [they can now] peek behind those statements,' says executive director Mark Orlowski... Six out of 10 college applicants and parents say the environmental factor would affect their decision to apply to or attend a school, according to a Princeton Review survey this year. The idea of ranking something as broad as environmentalism gives pause even to some considered leaders on this front. 'It's easy to fall into that trap of mine is greener than yours, but it is fundamentally inconsistent with the reasons why colleges should be becoming more sustainable…. We're all part of one system,' says David Hales, president of College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, Maine. A small campus focused on human ecology, it was the first to become carbon neutral. The environmental news website Grist ranked it top among15 green colleges and universitieslast year."