Green Schools on the Rise

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A green profile of 300 U.S. and 22 Canadian colleges and universities shows that many higher education institutions are putting their best green feet forward.

 

The College Sustainability Report Card 2011, an initiative of the nonprofit Sustainable Endowments Institute, reports that of the 300 colleges and universities in the U.S. with the largest endowments, more than half earned “B” level grades because of their strong green policies and practices in nine main categories. The nine categories include administration, climate change and energy, food and recycling, green building, student involvement, transportation, endowment transparency, investment priorities, and shareholder engagement.

 

Now in its fifth year, the College Sustainability Report Card yielded seven higher education institutions that earned “A” level grades, including Yale and Brown universities; Dickinson, Oberlin, and Pomona colleges; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A total of 322 institutions were surveyed by the SEI. Of those schools, 179 earned grades of “B” or better and because of strong performances largely in the six campus categories, only 35 colleges and universities received failing grades.

 

“A B+ is great,” says Rebecca Caine, a senior research fellow for the Institute. “It means the school is trying.”

 

Relying on campus and non-campus sustainability data from surveys distributed to each of the colleges and universities, the SEI calculates the report cards based on scores in each of the nine equally weighted categories. Within the categories are 52 indicators of green practices, including questions like whether or not the school website offers information on campus sustainability initiatives and if the college or university operates solar hot water systems.

 

Highlights of the 2011 study include that three-quarters of the schools reported having full-time staff working on sustainability and 49 percent of the higher ed institutions surveyed said they had endowment investments in renewable energy funds.

 

A blog published by the Chronicle of Higher Education writes that the SEI grades are suspect, because “they are derived in a somewhat mysterious fashion from surveys the colleges fill out themselves — which might lead to ‘greenwashing’ and other ways to game the system.”

 

Greenwashing refers to the practice of using PR or marketing tactics to deceptively present an organization or company’s environmentally friendly products or services.

 

According to the Chronicle blog, seven of the colleges included in the report wrote letters to the SEI and other organizations asking that sustainability grading measures adhere to “a set of principles, like transparency and accountability.”