The University of Oregon has been named the No. 20 party school in the nation by The Princeton Review in its annual college guide book and school officials have been quick to defend the school against the label.
“The information they gathered is very limited. They surveyed 1.6 percent of students on campus, so it’s a very small sampling of people,” said Julie Brown, the UO’s communications director.
On a post to the University’s Around The O public relations blog, they cite that the Massachusetts-based company averaged that they only talked to 333 students from each campus in its efforts to find a fitting list for universities.
Dean of Students Paul Shang called the survey “not particularly well done.”
“I think everybody knows we have a good time here in Eugene, and the city of Eugene itself has a good time,” Shang said. “But our students, on the other hand, are serious and hard-working and participate in a lot of important things.”
The Princeton Review, which has no affiliation with the Ivy League university, tabbed 126,000 students across 378 campuses for its Best of 378 Colleges book, released Monday. Included are many lists ranging from Most Beautiful Campus to Most LGBTQ-Friendly and Most Stone-cold Sober, which was topped by Brigham Young University for the fourth consecutive year.
A prevailing fondness for marijuana also landed the University at #8 on the “Reefer Madness” list.
“I think the primary issue is to not something like this to misrepresent the overall excellence of the education experience that our students participate in,” Shang said. “And not allow people have the wrong impression.”
According to the book, this year called The Best of 378 Colleges, the only real mention of alcohol concerns the University’s freshmen. The book states: “We are a dry campus,” one attendee notes, “but that doesn’t stop students.”
University of Iowa claimed the top spot on the party list, which the Review credits to a booming bar scene in Iowa City. The rest of the top five include: University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; West Virginia University and Syracuse University. Oregon is the only Pac-12 school to make the list.
Shang points out that even this year’s top party school may not be getting a fair shake.
“I know the University of Iowa and it’s a very prominent institution,” Shang says. “They have the largest medical facility at a university in the country.”
View the University of Oregon’s page in the book here.
A previous version of this story incorrectly included UC Santa Barbara as a Pac-12 school, as well as mentioning the University only appeared on the partying list.