The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted every part of life in this country, including in college towns such as Athens and Columbus. It has even undermined the all-important yearly party school rankings by the Princeton Review. Yes, I know, this is tragic news for anyone who follows these annual rankings religiously. That includes many current and former students at Ohio University and Ohio State, schools that have placed high on the list in past years.
Sadly, Inside Higher Ed reported in September, as the 2021-22 school year was getting underway, that because of the pandemic, the Princeton Review would skip the party school rankings for 2021. “This year, there were many cases where campuses were closed (except for online education), and conducting regular surveys was impossible. So The Princeton Review didn’t attempt to organize a ranking of party schools,” Inside Higher Education explained.
In the most recent year that the Princeton Review published its party school rankings, 2020, neither OU nor OSU appeared in the top 10. That list included a number of smaller schools (some that neither you nor we have ever heard of, or perhaps only hear about during NCAA basketball season). Union College in New York State anybody? Bucknell?
And likewise, in 2019, Ohio University had to face the awful news that it failed to rank in the Review’s top 20 party schools. These two fallow years for OU partying, followed by a year with no Princeton listing, were a tragic comedown from the pinnacle of party schools that OU had achieved many times in the past. That went back many decades to when Playboy magazine published a yearly ranking of top U.S. party schools. One apocryphal tale that circulated in the ’70s was that Ohio University had won top party school honors from Playboy so many times that the magazine disqualified it for “going professional.” Not sure if there’s any truth to that, but it’s a great story.
OU’s Fall From Party School Grace
In August 2019, The Athens NEWS – a then twice-weekly in Athens, Ohio – reported on OU’s absence from the Princeton Review’s party school ranking for that year. It noted, “The last time the university took the No. 1 spot on the PR’s list was in 2011, although Playboy Magazine ranked OU as the top party school in America as recently as 2015.”
At the time, a columnist for The Athens NEWS bemoaned the party-school fixation among OU students and alumni. However, the columnist, Terry Smith, in comparing party-school/town OU/Athens now to when he attended in the dark ages (’70s), came to a welcome conclusion: That while OU remains a party school, there are sufficient positive and constructive aspects of attending the university that it’s no longer defined by that party school rep, as it once was.
Smith concluded, “The fact that many OU Bobcats like to party makes them no different than most other young adults across the country, whether in college or not. But OU students don’t want to be defined by their attendance at a ‘top party school,’ and recoil when they are. That’s a good thing, and is something I couldn’t say when I was a student here.
The Princeton Review itself, in its section about Ohio University, makes that point based on interviews with OU students. “Some undergraduates note that the school holds true to its ‘reputation as a party school.’” Despite accepting that reality with varying degrees of approval, the blurb continues, “most accept things as they are, noting that ‘Ohio University is a school where everyone can find a group of people doing whatever they’re particularly interested in’; (in other words) partying is hardly the only option here.”
Other Party School Rankings
Lest we assume that the Princeton Review is the only game in town when it comes to ranking party schools, Niche.com, a popular ranking and review site for schools, colleges and workplaces, recently released its own list of the 2022 Top Party Schools in America. That list contains three universities from Ohio in its top 25. Ohio University (of course) places No. 12, Miami University (of Ohio) places 15, and Ohio State places 23. Niche explains that its rankings are based on statistics involving nightlife in or near the designated university along with student reviews.
Here’s Niche’s recent list of the top 25 party schools in the United States:
1) Tulane University; 2) Florida State University; 3) University of Wisconsin; 4) Howard University; 5) University of Alabama; 6) University of Georgia; 7) Syracuse University; 8) University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; 9) University of Southern California; 10) West Virginia University; 11) Penn State University; 12) Ohio University; 13) University of Iowa; 14) Indiana University – Bloomington; 15) Miami (of Ohio) University; 16) University of California – Santa Barbara; 17) University of Mississippi; 18) University of Texas – Austin; 19) Michigan State University; 20) San Diego State University; 21) University of Delaware; 22) Southern Methodist University; 23) Ohio State University; 24) University of Colorado – Boulder; 25) University of Miami.