Ithaca College

The Princeton Review - known for its education services helping students choose and get in to colleges - today reported its third annual “Green Ratings” of colleges: a measure of how environmentally friendly the institutions are on a scale of 60 to 99 – Ithaca College scored 98, same as last year.

The Company tallied the rating for 703 institutions based on its institutional surveys of colleges in 2009-10 concerning their environmentally related practices, policies and academic offerings. The Green Rating scores appear in the profiles of the 703 schools posted on the organization’s website: www.PrincetonReview.com.

Robert Franek, Princeton Review Senior VP / Publisher, notes the rising interest among students in attending green colleges. Among 12,000 college applicants and parents of applicants the organization surveyed this year for its annual "College Hopes & Worries Survey," 64% of respondents said they would value having information about a college's commitment to the environment. Within that cohort, 23% said such information would "very much" impact their decision to apply to or attend a school.

Criteria for Princeton Review's Green Rating cover three 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.

The institutional survey for the rating included questions on energy use, recycling, food, buildings, and transportation as well as academic offerings and action plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Princeton Review dedicates a resource area on its site www.princetonreview.com/green for students interested in attending a green college. There, users can also download "The Princeton Review's Guide to 286 Green Colleges" - the first free, comprehensive guidebook to the nation's most environmentally responsible colleges. The 197-page guide is a project The Princeton Review developed in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council (www.usgbc.org). Published in April, the guide has profiles of schools that received scores in the 80th or higher percentile in the Company's 2009 tallies for its Green Ratings – including Ithaca College. The guide can be downloaded at www.princetonreview.com/greenguide or at www.usgbc.org/campus.

(excerpted from: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/prnewswire/2010/08/02/prnewswire201008021233PR_NEWS_USPR_____NY44120.html)