Technically, the point of a college education is to study and learn in a field of your choosing, then graduate and start chasing the career goals you aspire to. That’s the bullshit line that every single high school guidance counselor has ever rattled off to a half-interested high school junior. But fuck that noise — If you’re going to go into crippling student debt that you’ll probably never pay off, you might as well have a damn good time while racking up a mountain of bills.
College years are the best four years of one’s life. It’s a cliche, but only because it’s true: When you find out how monotonous and dull the 9-to-5, rest-of-your-life working world is, you’ll wish you were drinking Bud Lights at 2pm on a Wednesday (’cause all your classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays) while watching Maury Povich reruns with your best friends, plotting Spring Break festivities in Panama City Beach. What’s the point of a college education if your extracurricular activities aren’t filled with great friends, epic stories, and trying to figure out one’s place in the world in regards to alcohol consumption and sex.
So what makes a college fun? School pride, playing intramural sports, partying, crushing beer, hooking up, etc. Knowing that the folks at Business Insider released a list ranking the most fun colleges based on a compilation of several rankings from The Princeton Review’s 2015 Best Colleges book. They used an actually methodology for their ranking, which makes my heart sing because it’s similar to how we compiled our 50 Best Party Schools list two years ago:
Once we identified these Princeton Review categories, we inverted the lists in order to award a larger amount of points to the schools ranked higher. For example, 20 points went to the #1 school on a list, 19 points to the #2, 18 to the #3, and so on through #20, which received a single point.
We then added up all the points we designated to each school to determine an overall ranking. Although no school appeared in all the lists we surveyed, every college in our top 20 was featured in three or more Princeton Review rankings.
Here’s the categories Business Insider used from the Princeton Review:
- Their Students Love These Colleges
- Students Study the Least
- Everyone Plays Intramural Sports
- Best Athletic Facilities
- Party Schools
- Jock Schools
- Lots of Hard Liquor
- Lots of Beer
- Lots of Greek Life
- College City Gets High Marks
- Happiest Students
- Best Quality of Life
When they tallied up all the points, here’s the list of schools they came back with:
20. Miami University
19. Auburn University
18. Bucknell University
17. University of Kansas
16. Lehigh University
15. University of Wisconsin — Madison
14. Southern Methodist University
13. University of Florida
12. University of California, Santa Barbara
11. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
10. Vanderbilt University
9. West Virginia University
8. Florida State University
7. Kansas State University
6. Virginia Tech University
5. University of Iowa
4. Tulane University
3. Syracuse University
2. Penn State University
1. Clemson University
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Can’t really disagree with anything on this list, except maybe the omission of PAC-12 party schools like Arizona or Arizona State. What do you think, Bros?
Read the breakdown of why each school is so much damn fun over at Business Insider.