Colleges Grow More Earth-Conscious to Lure Students

Boston Globe, July 29, 2008

Boston Globe's Tracy Jan explores the growing trend among colleges to green their campuses after the Princeton Review added a "Top Green Colleges" category in their "Best 368 Colleges" guidebook.

• Colleges across the country are rolling out a host of environmentally friendly initiatives, expanding beyond campus recycling and energy efficient buildings to hire sustainability officers to oversee all environmental programs.
  
• The rising fervor around environmental initiatives has launched Harvard, UNH, and the College of the Atlantic into the ranks of the nation's top green colleges, a new category in Princeton Review's "Best 368 Colleges," being released today.
  
• More than ever, prospective students are judging colleges on their environmental stewardship, along with the traditional rankings of academics.
  
• The conservation efforts - which include using the cold water setting when doing laundry, taking only what students think they will eat in the dining hall, and shutting windows in the winter - are paying off, saving the university at least $400,000 a year.
  
• Interest in environmental sustainability has grown so much among MIT students that the university made grants of up to $20,000 last year to encourage students to pursue energy research, such as mapping energy use in buildings across campus.

Boston Globe

Colleges Grow More Earth-Conscious to Lure Students
By Tracy Jan
July 29, 2008

Harvard pledged this month to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2016. The University of New Hampshire became the first school in the nation this year to use landfill methane gas as its prime energy source. And the College of the Atlantic in Maine plans to open green dormitories with composting toilets in August.

Colleges across the country are rolling out a host of environmentally friendly initiatives, expanding beyond campus recycling and energy efficient buildings to hire sustainability officers to oversee all environmental programs. The push coincides with the rise of "green college" rankings and as the schools use their new policies and practices as a recruiting tool for students who came of age during the release of "An Inconvenient Truth," former vice president Al Gore's popular documentary about global warming.

"The current generation of students wants to go to schools that take their environmental responsibility seriously," said Julian Dautremont-Smith, associate director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, based in Lexington, Ky. "In the last two or three years, it's really picked up, past some sort of tipping point."

The rising fervor around environmental initiatives has launched Harvard, UNH, and the College of the Atlantic into the ranks of the nation's top green colleges, a new category in Princeton Review's "Best 368 Colleges," being released today.

To read the full story, please CLICK HERE.

Return to Articles »