University of Illinois is Knocked Out of the Top Ten Party Schools List

This is kind of a good news/bad news scenario, depending on whether you're an attending student or a parent who's paying your kid's tuition at the U of I. Those parents hoping for more studying than partying out of their child are probably smiling, while the would-be party animals are not.

The Princeton Review is out with it's "Best 382 Colleges" report, and it illustrates how things change in a two-year span.

Why 2 years? Well, that's how long it's been since the Princeton Review named the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as the nation's top party school.

First off, to the methodology Princeton used to determine what a party school is:

Party Schools/Stone-Cold Sober Schools
Both lists are based on students' answers to survey questions concerning: the use of alcohol and drugs at their school, the number of hours they study each day outside of class time and the popularity of fraternities/sororities at their school.

Schools on the "Party Schools" list are those at which surveyed students' answers indicated a combination of low personal daily study hours (outside of class), high usages of alcohol and drugs on campus and high popularity on campus for frats/sororities.

Schools on the "Stone-Cold Sober Schools" list are those at which surveyed students' answers indicated a combination of high personal daily study hours (outside of class), low usages of alcohol and drugs on campus and low popularity on campus for frats/sororities.

Back to the U of I Urbana-Champaign. As I mentioned before, 2 years ago the university was named #1 in the nation. Last year, that number slipped to 3rd. Now, in the latest edition of the Princeton Review, U of I is ranked at #14 out of 20.

No particular reason was given for the downgrade (or, for parents, upgrade), so maybe other schools just kicked the partying up into a higher gear. The University of Wisconsin-Madison is at #5 on the list, and the University of Iowa has the #11 spot.

The Princeton Review's Top Ten Party Schools in the Nation:

1. Tulane
2. West Virginia University
3. Bucknell University
4. Syracuse
5. University of Wisconsin-Madison (last year's #1)
6. University of Delaware
7. University of Colorado-Boulder
8. Colgate University
9. Lehigh University
10. University of Maine

As a side-note, if you're looking to send your student off to the number one "Stone Cold Sober" school, look no further than the university that has held that title for 20 straight years: Brigham Young University.