I recently came across this write up on the Arizona State University news site and am proud to share it. Kudos to the Princeton review for this category of rating to encourage healthy, positive competition between universities and kudos to ASU for taking some great initiative and striving to be proactive when it comes to solving some of the biggest environmental issues we are facing.
Princeton Review rating based on environmental practices, policies and course offerings
Arizona State University has been named one of the nation’s “greenest” universities by The Princeton Review in its first-ever rating of environmentally friendly institutions.The “2009 Green Rating Honor Roll” is a numerical score on a scale of 60 to 99 that The Princeton Review tallied for 534 colleges and universities based on data it collected from the schools in the 2007-08 academic year concerning their environmentally related policies, practices and academic offerings.
The Green Rating scores appear in the website profiles of the 534 schools that posted on The Princeton Review’s site (www.PrincetonReview.com) today.
Tracy Perkins | Posted in 
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August 26th, 2008 at 9:20 am
What exactly is it that makes ASU so green? I went there for a year and it didnt strike me a America’s Greenest University.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:33 am
“The criteria for the rating (which ecoAmerica helped formulate along with the rating’s data collection survey and methodology) cover three broad areas:
1) whether the school’s students have a campus quality of life that is healthy and sustainable,
2) how well the school is preparing its students for employment and citizenship in a world defined by environmental challenges, and
3) the school’s overall commitment to environmental issues.”
..”initiatives to deploy solar power on all four campuses, create highly efficient buildings, launch a first-of-its-kind School of Sustainability, and support a transdisciplinary research federation dedicated to finding sustainable solutions for issues of energy, water, urbanization, and climate change”
While these initiatives might be less visible to students not involved in the research itself or interested in the ASU School of Sustainability or affiliated majors (geoscience, environmental science, engineering, geography, etc) the efforts are being made. This is a good point though, that it is not visible enough to most students and perhaps this article is not a big enough effort to let people know how ASU is making changes but hopefully it is a start.