NEWS
Madison off list of top party schools for 2nd straight year
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by Carl Jaeger
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
The University of Wisconsin was absent from the list of top party schools for the second consecutive year in the Princeton Review’s most recent review of the “Best 368 Colleges.”
This year, the top party school title was given to the University of Florida, followed by the University of Mississippi and Penn State University.
Three years ago, UW was ranked the No. 1 party school and fell to the No. 4 spot one year later.
This year, UW ranked No. 6 in the “Lots of Beer” category — down from the No. 1 position in last year’s rankings — and No. 9 for “Lots of Hard Liquor.”
According to the Princeton Review, 120,000 students from the top 368 schools rated their individual schools on a variety of topics ranging from “Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians” to “Best Campus Food.”
The students completed an 80-question survey. Ninety-five percent of students completed the survey online, while five percent completed a paper copy on individual campuses.
Aaron Brower, principal investigator for Policy, Alternatives, Community and Education — a project working to reduce the consequences of high-risk drinking on campus — said the rankings speak little to UW’s drinking culture.
“Don’t take that as any reflection of either the seriousness of the problem or changes on campus,” Brower said. “Take it only as the more that they switch up the rankings, the more they are able to generate news and therefore sell their magazine.”
Despite The Princeton Review’s rankings, the drinking rate at UW has stayed relatively constant throughout the last decade, Brower said, though the problems associated with drinking are slowly trending downward.
Being included in the rankings does have some positive effects, Brower added, as it creates public awareness of the seriousness of the problem, changing the stereotype that “Wisconsin is a big party.”
Brower added the consequences of drinking — like vandalism, sexual assault and academic problems — are the biggest issues.
“It’s the consequences from the drinking that’s really the problem, it’s not the drinking,” Brower said. “If you … over drink and you go home and wake up the next day and there’s no issue, then that’s up to you to decide how you want to do that.”
Brower, who is also a professor at UW’s School of Social Work, also critiqued the method in which The Princeton Review collects its data, calling it “very, very arbitrary” and “as unscientific as you can get.”
“If they were to do this for a class project in my statistics class, I would turn it back and tell them to redo their study,” Brower said.
UW also ranked ninth in the “Top Ten Best Value Public Colleges” list and 16th for “Students Pack the Stadium.”
The Princeton Review’s “Best 368 Colleges” has been published annually since 1992.
