Sierra Club Names America's Greenest Universities

As kids around the country pack their bags for the start of another college year, they might be wondering, "just how green is my school?"

Well now they can find out how their school compares with the release of Sierra magazine's fourth annual "Coolest Schools" survey.

Sierra polled 900 colleges and universities around the country to come up with their list of the 20 greenest schools. Criteria included sustainable energy use, efficiency, food, academics, purchasing, transportation, waste management, administration, financial investments and a catchall section titled "other initiatives."

Sustainable energy use was actually a new category for this year's rankings, and it caused quite a shuffle. Nine of last year's top 20 schools dropped off the list because their energy choices weren't green enough.

So what were the results? Here's the top five:

1. Green Mountain College (Poultney, Vermont)2. Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pennsylvania)3. Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington)4. University of Washington (Seattle, Washington)5. Stanford University (Palo Alto, California)

Other schools on this year's list included Harvard University, Georgia Institute of Technology and several University of California campuses.

You can find the full list, along with information on all of the schools that responded to Sierra's survey, here.

Photo by Harrison Keely via Stock.xchng.