by Education News

These days, the students are giving more and more weight to how “green” a prospective college is when making enrollment decisions, reports USA Today. And schools are paying attention to the new trend by highlighting their commitment to the environment and sustainability, talking up green-focused academic programs and pointing kids and parents to campus opportunities to make a difference.

According to Robert Frank, the senior vice president of publishing at The Princeton Review, these moves on the part of the schools are often in response to student demands for such information:

“Many more schools are simply talking about their commitment to the environment because so many college-bound students are asking those questions.”

TPR is responding to the demand in its own way by releasing a downloadable “Guide to 311 Green Colleges.” The guide, a joint effort between the The Princeton Review and the U.S. Green Building Council, rates schools on criteria such as availability of local food, waste-management strategies and campus transportation options. The guide found that schools are taking different approaches to appear eco-friendly:

• The College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, includes the travel mileage of every prospective student who comes to visit as part of the carbon debt it must offset to remain carbon-neutral.
• At Elon University in Elon, N.C., a touch-screen allows students and parents to monitor energy and water consumption in real time at the school’s greenest building, one of the first stops on campus tours.
• At Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C., prospective students can “see, hear and smell best practices” in sustainability on the school’s Green Walkabout; stops include an Eco Dorm, farm and recycling center.

Richard Blomgren, President of Warren Wilson, says that while he welcomes other schools’ new green efforts, WWC has long had an ear open to the students’ ideas on the subject. According to him, many of the college’s environmental initiatives, some going back as far as a decade, were “student-driven.”

http://www.educationnews.org/higher_education/154463.html