I recently wrote about Playboy Magazine’s rankings of the top 25 party schools in America.
Today, Inside Higher Ed carries a very thoughtful piece about party school rankings, including those published by the Princeton Review.
The fact is that these rankings are sometimes manipulated by students on campuses. For example, there is some indication that Penn State students pushed one another on various Facebook groups to vote for their school (the rankings are derived from online student surveys).
Are these rankings valid? Probably not, in a statistical sense. And as I have said, nearly every college is a party school in one sense or another.
But the folks at Princeton Review do point out that the schools at the top of the party school list have been fairly consistent over time. (There also is quite a lot of overlap between Playboy‘s list and the Princeton Review‘s list). They also point to the fact that Brigham Young University has been at the top of their “Stone Cold Sober” list for 12 years in a row. So perhaps there is a grain of truth in these rankings.
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant
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