Sierra Magazine Cool Schools 2017 Overview

Dear Campus Sustainability Professionals:

Sierra magazine invites you to participate in our 2017 “Cool Schools” rankings.  

For 11 years now, Sierra (the national magazine of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest grassroots environmental group) has published a ranking of the greenest colleges and universities, as measured by campus sustainability programs and curricula. Each year, our scorecard reaches more than 1 million print and online readers. Our ranking, and the stories surrounding it, draw national media attention from outlets such as TheNew York Times, CNN, NPR, and many others.

Once again, we are partnering with the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) to collect the bulk of our raw data. As in 2016, there will be one outside question this year, addressing endowment and fossil fuel divestment.

Institutions can report data using either the STARS 2.0 or STARS 2.1 Reporting Tools, available on AASHE's website. STARS offers a basic level of access at no cost to institutions. We are not accepting data from older versions of the reporting tool, from community colleges, or from schools outside the United States and Canada. (Please note, this is the first year that we are including colleges and universities in Canada.)

To participate in our Cool Schools ranking, you must:

1. Register for STARS (at either the basic or full level of access) at https://stars.aashe.org/pages/register/register-stars.html.  

2. Report your data in either the STARS 2.0 or 2.1 Reporting Tools.

3. Check the box to save a "snapshot," to share your data with Sierra magazine. IMPORTANT: Note that fields still marked as “In Progress” do not migrate to our system and will not be scored.

4. Complete our supplementary fossil fuel divestment question, which you can find here [LINKTK]. Schools that do not complete this question can still participate.

As always, our scoring matrix and key will be available online after all of the data is collected and the ranking is published. Each school’s scoring will be available online once we've published our rankings in Sierra's September/October 2017 issue.

This year’s deadline for submitting information through the AASHE STARS system will be 11:59 PM on March 3. Any information submitted to STARS between March 23, 2016, and March 3, 2017, will be eligible for scoring.

Our list of questions is available below. Please note that these Credits and Titles are as they appear in the Stars 2.1 System.  As mentioned above, we will also have one additional question this year regarding your institution’s investments in fossil fuels.

Thank you for participating in Sierra’s 2016 Cool Schools ranking. If you have any questions about this year’s survey, please do not hesitate to contact jason.mark@sierraclub.org.

Sierra Cool Schools Ranking Questions (as they appear in STARS 2.1)