It looks like the Princeton Review’s new green school rankings have created another heated arena in which Harvard, Yale and Princeton compete for supremacy and top students. Harvard and Yale earned perfect scores of 99 while Princeton scored an impressive 94 on a scale based on sustainability and environmental impact on campus. We’ve talked about colleges and their efforts to go green in previous posts, and these rankings provide the first quantitative evaluations that I’ve seen. Two main points stuck out to me from this story:

• First, the motivating factor behind creating the rankings themselves apparently came from a Princeton Review Survey of 10,000 high school students where 63% said that an eco-friendly environment would weigh heavily in where they decided to apply and attend. Once again, it speaks to the growing environmental awareness of the next generation, and it also indicates that schools may want to continue focusing on staying sustainable if they want to have their pick of the nation’s best and brightest.
• On a related note, Princeton has apparently made a commitment to get every new building that it builds LEED® certified. In addition, the school plans to reduce overall emissions to where they were in 1990 by 2020. Talk about turning back the clock to take a step forward.

In any event, this story goes to show that a little healthy competition never hurt anyone, especially when it comes to the environment. It’ll be interesting to see whether Princeton can achieve the goals it’s set out for itself and perhaps earn a spot on the Princeton Review “Honor Roll” for next year. Stay tuned.

(Photo via Morguefile)