Sustainability grade unchanged on yearly report card

For the third year in a row, USC earned a C+ on the Sustainable Endowments Institute’s College Sustainability Report Card, though officials question some of the report’s methods.

“Basically the survey is an oversimplification, trying to apply a standard metric to sustainability,” said Matthew Oden, USC’s sustainability manager. “It doesn’t really help in reality.”

The College Sustainability Report Card gives individual grades for factors such as climate change and energy, food and recycling, green building and student involvement. These grades are averaged to produce the overall grade.

Oden said that rating systems like the College Sustainability Report Card often hold schools to standards that don’t necessarily apply to them.

Stanford, for example, has received recognition for its successful utilization of solar energy. Oden said that some people expect USC to do the same, but the school can’t because it is under contract with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

But Chryslyn Pais, a member of SEI’s research team, said campuses are not graded on standards that don’t apply.

“Every campus has different limitations and in some cases certain sustainability programs and commitments are not applicable to a school,” Pais said. “In these cases, this part of the grade is not factored into the average.”

Irrelevance is not the only qualm some officials have with the grading system. Oden said the ratings can often be inconsistent.

The new Ronald Tutor Campus Center, for example, will be LEED — Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — certified, meaning it met the group’s sustainability standards. But USC’s “green building” grade still fell from a B to a D on the 2010 report card.

“Our buildings will be of LEED caliber, but still our building grades went down,” Oden said.

Oden said there were many other areas the school improved in, even if they are not reflected by the report card.

“We have improved so much and in so many ways and a lot of people see USC as a leading green school,” he said. “It doesn’t seem reflective of our work, but no one is overly concerned about it.”

The grades are based entirely on information from public documents and on surveys the colleges fill out. Pais said the graders do not visit the school.

Even schools who received better grades take issue with parts of the grading system.

Nurit Katz, the campus sustainability coordinator at UCLA, which received a B, said the rating system puts too much emphasis on how finance is kept and how the schools manage their endowments.

“Our endowment is invested in mutual funds, and we don’t have a lot of discretion concerning where it goes,” Katz said. “It can be frustrating because we’re still doing so much for sustainability.”

But the SEI also isn’t the only group to rate schools based on green practices. The Sierra Club and a website called Greenopia are just two of the other groups measuring sustainability. The Sierra Club didn’t rate USC last year, and the most recent Greenopia rating gave the school one out of four for meeting between 40 and 50 percent of its grading criterion. The Princeton Review’s green rating system gave USC 90 out of 99 points, while UCLA received 88 points.

“Imagine getting an A from one professor and a B or a C from another based on the exact same work you did in a class,” Katz said. “[The ratings] are good because they bring focus to sustainability, but they’re not exactly consistent.”

Regardless of its recent C+ grade, Katz thinks Oden has put USC on the right track.

“He’s starting with these

less-established programs and the work he’s done is really impressive,” Katz said. “The grade shouldn’t matter. USC is moving along so fast.”