University of Illinois Tops Party School List For 2015

The Princeton Review released its annual list of the top party schools in America, and it was a Big Ten rout at the top for 2015.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign topped the list, with Iowa and Wisconsin-Madison coming in second and third, respectively.

While some Illinois students may have been excited about the ranking, its top official was not.

“It’s disappointing that, once again, Princeton Review is promoting this pseudo-ranking as though it were meaningful,” Illinois Chancellor Phyllis Wise told CNN in a statement about the ranking. “It’s insulting to all of our students, since they are here to prepare to become leaders of their generation.”

Bucknell University is the first non-Big Ten school on the list at number four, while Syracuse rounds out the top five.

The exact formula for how the ranking was determined was not explained in a press release from the review, but it did give a general overview about how all of their rankings are compiled.

“The rankings are based on surveys of 136,000 students (average 358 per campus) at the 380 colleges in the book in 2014–15 and/or the previous two school years,” the release says.

“The survey asks students 80 questions about their school’s academics, administration, student body, and themselves. The ranking methodology uses a five-point Likert scale to convert qualitative student assessments into quantitative data for school-to-school comparisons.”

Here were the top 20 from the list:

1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2. University of Iowa

3. University of Wisconsin-Madison

4. Bucknell University

5. Syracuse University

6. University of California-Santa Barbara

7. West Virginia University

8. University of Georgia

9. Tulane University

10. Colgate University

11. Lehigh University

12. University of Mississippi

13. Penn State University

14. University of Florida

15. Florida State University

16. Ohio University

17. DePauw University

18. University of Vermont

19. Miami University

20. College of Charleston

On the other end of the spectrum, BYU was named the most “stone-cold sober” school for the 18th year in a row.

Check out the full party school rankings here

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