Filed by KOSU News in Education.
August 3, 2011

For the second year in a row, two universities in towns named Athens are at the top of the Party Schools rankings put out by the Princeton Review. But this year, Ohio University topped the University of Georgia for the No. 1 spot.

It’s inconceivable that a job applicant would highlight their school’s party bona fides on a resume, but people seem to love this list. Perhaps it’s just a way for graduates to look back on their university days with pride, and the knowledge that they really did have more fun than the yahoos at that other school.

At any rate, Playboy magazine put out its own list this spring — and Hef’s list had more of a Western tilt to it, with the University of Colorado at Boulder taking top honors, followed by the University of Texas-Austin.

The Princeton Review’s 2012 survey of colleges is drawn from the poll responses of more than 122,000 students. As the AP reports,

The Princeton Review survey is part of its 2012 edition of The Best 376 Colleges, which includes 61 other rankings in categories such as best professors (Wellesley College in Massachusetts), most beautiful campus (Florida Southern College) best campus food (Wheaton College in Illinois) and highest financial aid satisfaction (Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania).

Here are some other facts from the survey:

One third of the 376 schools in the Princeton Review list have tuitions that are less than $15,000 a year.

Tiny Deep Springs College is a school “with only 26 students (all male, and all of whom are on a full scholarship),” Princeton Review says. The students evidently stay for two years, forming their own coursework and curriculum. Then they often transfer to other top-tier schools such as Harvard and Yale.

According to Princeton Review, “The students run the school, work the ranch and farm where it’s located out in California’s High Desert.”

And then there’s the one-major school: College of the Atlantic, in Maine. All 325 of its students study Human Ecology.

Maybe the Atlantic kids could do some research at the party schools, to see how their local ecospheres motivate, reward and sustain such truly top-drawer partying. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]