UConn Tops Green Colleges Ranking

The University of Connecticut tops Sierra Club’s annual green colleges list, jumping from No. 5 to the No. 1 and pushing last year’s “coolest school,” the University of California, Davis, down to No. 4.

The University of Connecticut offers more than 600 sustainability-related classes and has reduced its water use by 15 percent since 2005, Sierra says. Over the past two years the school has retrofitted 13 buildings to prevent emitting 2,640 annual tons of carbon dioxide.

In addition, more than a quarter of the food served in dining halls is processed within 100 miles, with many ingredients harvested right on campus, according to the green raking. UConn’s first appearance on Sierra magazine’s “Coolest Schools” list was in 2010, at No. 49.

While none of this year’s colleges earned a perfect score in Sierra’s categories, which included cutting emissions, waste and water use, UConn earned 850.14 out of a possible 1,000 points.

Sierra magazine’s top 10 schools of 2013 are:

1. University of Connecticut (Storrs, Conn.)
2. Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pa.)
3. University of California, Irvine (Irvine, Calif.)
4. University of California, Davis (Davis, Calif.)
5. Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)
6. Green Mountain College (Poultney, Vt.)
7. Stanford University (Stanford, Calif.)
8. Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, Ga.)
9. American University (Washington, DC)
10. University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, Calif.)

This is the seventh annual “Coolest Schools” list. US colleges that submitted complete, updated data starting on June 2, 2013 or thereafter were eligible for this year’s rankings. Sierra received 162 complete responses from qualified colleges, compared to only 96 that answered Sierra Club’s 2012 survey questions.

The 2012 list noted No. 1 school UC Davis diverted about 70 percent of its trash, opened the country’s largest planned zero-net-energy residential community and encouraged bike use on campus.

Stanford University, Cornell University, Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles are among 22 colleges nationwide listed on Princeton Review’s 2014 Green Rating Honor Roll, also published this month.