Forget Go Blue, Crimson or Big Orange: Kids Want Green Colleges

I have a number of years before my kids get ready to apply for college, and it doesn’t feel that long ago that I was going through the college application process. (Note to self: it’s been at least 20 years. Get a grip. You’re old.) At that time I had a certain criteria that the colleges I applied to needed to fulfill–urban campus, good journalism program, bountiful housing–and high school students today are no different in having criteria as well. Except in one way: More and more soon-to-be college freshman are ranking their higher education options based on how green a college is.

For parents and teens for whom green is an important consideration, your first stop should probably be the College Sustainability Report Card. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Sustainable Endowments Institute, a non-profit that, since 2005, has been dedicated to advancing sustainability on college campuses nationwide, among other education-related projects, created this report card.

According to a recent New York Times article on the 2008 College Sustainability Report Card, only a handful of American institutions of higher ed received an “A”–and then it was an “A-” only. Those colleges were Harvard, Dartmouth, University of Washington, Middlebury, Carleton, and University of Vermont. (Interesting how four of the six green colleges are in New England, and two are in Vermont–the Green Mountain State which is a notably green state in its own right.)

One area where most colleges–there were 200 in the report–did the best was the “Food & Recycling” category. That seems about right to me, because I’ve heard about a lot of schools that have greened their cafeteria operations by composting food scraps, among other things. One such place is Delaware Valley College, which has an active composting program on its Doylestown, Pennsylvania campus. The college composts food scraps, lawn clippings and animal waste–it’s an agricultural school so there’s livestock living on campus. (DelVal, as it’s known, isn’t in the report card mentioned above.)

So what are you to do if you’ve got an eco-minded high schooler who has ranked a college’s eco-friendly profile right up there with its academics? Well for starters your kid isn’t alone. This Huffington Post article, citing a Princeton Review study, says that 63 percent of undergraduate applicants take into consideration a school’s sustainability initiatives. Here are some ideas to help figure out which college is the right green college for your kid:

* Use third-party rankings
The College Sustainabiliy Report Card website offers an alphabetical list of all 200 colleges that participated in its green survey–from Agnes Scott College, a private liberal arts college for women in Atlanta, to Yeshiva University, a private Jewish university in New York City, with lots of Ivies in between (Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Princeton). Even my alma mater, NYU, is on the list–it got a C+. You can download each school’s green report card.

You might want to check out the newest Kaplan College Guide (for 2009), which this year includes an expanded section on sustainable colleges and universities, as well as green career options. This new book also includes coverage of green organizations for students interested in volunteering or learning more, and a glossary of terms to help students think and speak like sustainability experts. As usual the book includes “regular” profiles of some 700 private and public colleges and universities. (You can click below to buy the book, if you’d like.)

From a different perspective, check out this EPA website that ranks the top 10 colleges and universities with regards to purchasing green power. Most are buying “credits” for wind power, but at least they’re doing something. And on the Worldwatch Institute website, you’ll find profiles of colleges and universities with notable campus greening initiatives.

* Search college websites for sustainability efforts
Unless a college has something to hide, I would imagine that it would be promoting its green initiatives on its website. Perhaps you might not find a link right from the home page but if you plug “sustainability” into the website’s search box, I’ll be that you find a gold mine of green information. If you don’t, that’s probably pretty telling. (Here’s a page I found on Santa Clara University’s Sustainable Living Undergraduate Research Project or SLURP.)

* See the green first hand
Visiting any college you hope to apply to is critical in the decision-making process. For an eco-minded student, it’s even more so. It’s usually during campus tours or interviews with admissions officers that you get to ask questions that you can’t find answers to elsewhere–or you want to ask them to see how the person answers your questions in a face-to-face setting. The Princeton Review website has a good list of suggested questions to ask about sustainability on campus.

Of course, no one wants to be a hypocrite when it comes to green living. So if you’re sending your freshman off to college with a car, make sure it’s an economical and eco-friendly one.