Sustainable Endowments Institute (SEI) released its 2008 College Sustainability Report Card today to great fanfare. The report grades the sustainability performance of the 200 campuses with the largest endowments. Letter grades are assigned in 8 categories: Administration, Climate Change & Energy, Food & Recycling, Green Building, Transportation, Endowment Transparency, Investment Priorities, and Shareholder Engagement.

The report provides an amazing amount of information about what schools are doing on sustainability that will be a great help to campus sustainability advocates. The statistics and trend data the report provides will also be very useful in making the case for sustainability on campus. SEI has done the campus sustainability community a real favor in collecting and disseminating all of this data.

If the response to last year’s report card is any indication, the report will get a huge amount of attention over the next few weeks and will bring a great deal of high-level attention to campus sustainability. Last year’s report was covered in the student newspaper of almost every campus that was evaluated, often with responses from top campus officials.

Also like last year, I expect the report card’s methodology will be questioned. Overall, however, the grades seem pretty reasonable to me. The schools that received top marks - Harvard, Dartmouth, University of Washington, Middlebury, Carleton, and University of Vermont - are recognized sustainability leaders, and I doubt that an improved methodology would result in more than a moderate reshuffling of grades.

That said, there is always room for improvement, and so I offer the following critiques/suggestions in the spirit of constructive criticism.

1. The grading system would be stronger if a more comprehensive set of sustainability indicators were used. Education and research are probably two of the most important ways a campus can contribute to sustainability, yet they aren’t included at all in SEI’s grades. Institutions should get credit for efforts to integrate sustainability into teaching and research. Likewise, the social dimensions of sustainability (such as community service, living wages, anti-sweatshop initiatives, diversity, and affordability) aren’t meaningfully included in the grading, which could be seen as perpetuating the historically inaccurate belief that sustainability is primarily an environmental issue. On the environmental side, food and waste should be split into separate categories. There’s no obvious reason to lump them together, and doing so undervalues them relative to the other categories. Also, it might be worth adding new categories on things like water consumption, grounds management, and procurement, which aren’t currently covered very comprehensively.
2. A more transparent and less subjective process for assigning grades in each category would further strengthen the report. Under the current process, at least two independent reviewers assign grades based on their interpretation of the data that SEI collected. SEI provides a list of indicators that the reviewers take into account in their evaluation, but these indicators seem to be of varying levels of significance and there’s no information about how each indicator is weighted relative to the others. This grading system results in some hard-to-understand grades, especially if you go through and read all of the grades and descriptions in a single category. For example, University of Michigan, which apparently has a LEED Gold policy, and Dickinson College, which has a LEED Silver policy, received only Bs in green building while several campuses who received As in this category (see Dartmouth, Mt. Holyoke, and Northeastern for instance) merely incorporate environmental principles in its building policy or have lower level commitments to LEED. There may be good reasons for these grades, but they certainly aren’t clear from the descriptions. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only example of seemingly contradictory grading standards in the report - I found quite a few more while reviewing the profiles. Perhaps next year, SEI could create and publish a set of objective requirements necessary to achieve each grade.
3. Given how far most campuses are from sustainability right now, assigning anyone an A is problematic, as Gioia Thompson, University of Vermont’s Environmental Coordinator, points out in Inside Higher Ed. It can be taken to imply that a campus has no more work to do in a given category, which isn’t the case for any campus that I’m aware of. Moreover, the bar for receiving an A in each category seems quite low. For example, investing just a tiny portion of one’s endowment in a renewable energy fund is sufficient earn an A in the Investment Priorities category. I not sure how best to fix this issue but some reevaluation of the grading standards might be appropriate.

At the end of the day, all systems of comparing and rating campuses on sustainability criteria are inherently imperfect. SEI deserves a lot of credit for not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The report provides a tremendous amount of useful information, and should bring more attention to campus sustainability among higher education leaders. In spite of the methodological problems noted above, I expect that the overall impact of this report will be quite positive for the campus sustainability community.

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Campus Operations, Julian Dautremont-Smith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.