U. of Iowa Tops Princeton Review's 2014 Party School List

The University of Iowa has earned the coveted — or dreaded — top spot on the Princeton Review’s list of the top 20 party schools in the country for 2014, which was released Monday in the publisher’s annual Best 378 Colleges guide.

Despite administrators’ three-year plan to curb binge drinking, the University of Iowa has been inching to the top of the “party school” list for the past three years. It was ranked No. 4  two years ago and moved up to No. 2 on last year's list. The university also earned the No. 1 spot on this year's “lots of hard liquor” list.

Spokesman Tom Moore said in an e-mailed statement that the university is continuing to work to "change the culture" on campus by educating students to only consume alcohol in a legal and responsible manner. In 2010, the Iowa City Council passed a 21-only ordinance, which raised the city bars’ entry age from 19 to 21 after 10 p.m. The percentage of University of Iowa students who engage in "high-risk drinking" is down from 70 percent in 2009 to 58 percent in 2013, according to the National College Health Assessment survey. There have also been decreases in alcohol-related crime and alcohol-related visits to hospitals, Moore said.

"In each of the last four years, alcohol harm to our students has decreased. It is, frankly, still too high," Moore said. "We are heartened, though, by the steady progress we have made, and are committed to continuing this progress."

West Virginia University, which was named the top party school last year, dropped to the No. 4 spot in this year’s rankings. The University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are ranked No. 2 and No. 3 respectively.

The Princeton Review college guide includes individual profiles of each college, along with rankings based on an online survey of more than 122,000 students nationwide. The top-20 party schools rankings list is based on the answers from a combination of student survey questions about alcohol and drug use, hours of study each day and the popularity of the Greek system. Critics note that students are simply evaluating their own institutions and so the results are not based on actual comparisons.

Bloggers from BroBible (“the ultimate destination for Bros”) decided to take the “flawed” party school rankings into their own hands and created the “BroBible Party School Index” in April. The website scored universities based on a mathematical formula that combines rankings from a number of different lists and years. With an index score of 406.5, West Virginia University took the No. 1 spot on the BroBible’s 50 Best Party Schools list.