Princeton Review’s Green Honor Roll Omits Colleges That Complained About Ratings. Coincidence?

The most interesting thing about a GreenBiz story on the Princeton Review’s 2011 Green Rating Honor Roll is not necessarily the list of distinguished colleges. Rather, it’s a testy little back-and-forth between an anonymous commenter and David Soto, the company’s director of college ratings. The whole thing might highlight just how imprecise and subjective the business of green ratings can be.

The article lists the 18 colleges that got the Princeton Review’s highest rating for green efforts. Certainly, many of those on the list—like Arizona State University, Unity College, Warren Wilson College, College of the Atlantic—have lots of street cred for their green efforts. The efforts of others, like West Virginia University and Northeastern University, might be less well known.

But the anonymous commenter homed in on one angle: None of the names on the honor roll were signatories of a recent letter that both protested the methodology of such green-ratings systems and asked for eight specific changes to the way most green surveys are conducted.

The signatories are no slouches when it comes to sustainability, the commenter pointed out. They include the University of Colorado at Boulder, which was recently rated the greenest institution by the Sierra Club, and Emory University, Ithaca College, the University of Vermont, and many more leaders in green efforts.

“It may be a coincidence that these schools were omitted, or maybe Princeton Review has other motivations, we don’t know,” the commenter wrote. The survey does not use standard metrics accepted by most sustainability administrators, “so no telling.”

In both in his response and a follow-up interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Soto denied that there was any correlation between the signatories of the letter and the results of the survey. He pointed out that Boulder, Emory, Ithaca, Vermont, and the rest had scored high on the survey—just not high enough.

But he was elusive when asked a crucial question about how the survey would be conducted in the future: Would Princeton Review conform to the eight demands laid out in the letter? Mr. Soto said that the company reviews the survey procedures periodically, and that it is about to do so again. “We don’t have a plan in place at the moment,” he said. “It’s too early to say.”