The University of Colorado at Boulder's A Matter of Degree program, other AMOD campuses and the American Medical Association have a suggestion for the public and media about the Princeton Review's "Top Party Schools" list: take it with a grain of salt.
The AMOD group and the AMA claim the rankings, to be published next week in the Princeton Review's annual "Best Colleges" guide, are misleading and give college-bound students a skewed perception about partying on campus.
"Almost every year we encounter parents, students, alumni and friends of the university who are worrying about the rankings in the guide," said Bob Maust, principal investigator for the campus AMOD program. "We'd certainly prefer that if prospective parents and students are interested in information about CU-Boulder, they go to our Web site for accurate information, or better yet, talk with our staff rather than reading and believing such publications."
The Princeton Review is a division of New York-based Random House publishers and is not affiliated with Princeton University. It claims that roughly 100,000 students are polled every three years on a variety of issues, but the poll has been widely criticized by academic administrators for its lack of scientific accuracy.
For example, larger schools often have the same number of respondents as smaller schools, producing an unrepresentative sample. Recent online polling also has been criticized due to evidence that some schools have sent the questionnaire to specific students for predictable responses.
Additionally, the survey has been criticized because titles for the survey categories do not represent accurately the questions students are actually asked. For example, students are asked to rank their schools based on such questions as "lots of hard liquor," "major frat and sorority scene" and "lack of time spent studying," which are combined for the "party school ranking," irrelevantly assuming that those who spend little time studying automatically party more.
Even the Princeton Review's own staff members have expressed second thoughts about including the party ranking in the guide. In 1997, former editor-in-chief Evan Schnittman told a publication that he debated pulling the party ranking for years "because it's not something that represents what the book's about." But he stopped short of doing that from fear that eliminating the ranking would result in "zero press" and thus, fewer sales.
"Public institutions do need to be held accountable for their actions, but it isn't right to present them to the public in such an irresponsible manner," said Peggy Bonner, AMOD's program director at CU-Boulder. "We've recently been awarded two new Nobel Prizes in physics, ranked third in the nation among public research universities in the number of Fulbright Scholars we had last year and we've attracted more than $229 million this year in research awards and grants, but we're presented by this publication as just a party school."
For the past several years, the AMOD program at CU-Boulder has been addressing the issue of binge drinking on campus and in the local community. Using different approaches, and working with different campus and community groups, the program has seen a decline in the high-risk drinking rate among students.
According to the 2001 Harvard College Alcohol survey, CU-Boulder has shown a 14 percent decline in its high-risk drinking rate since 1999, a larger decline than most other AMOD campuses in the country.