College of the Atlantic's 36-acre, waterfront campus sits between Frenchman Bay and Acadia Na...College of the Atlantic's 36-acre, waterfront campus sits between Frenchman Bay and Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, Maine.

College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor has been ranked the top green college by the Princeton Review for the sixth year in a row. The school has inherent advantages, such as the fact that it was founded with environmental sustainability in mind—the only degree it offers is a bachelor of arts in human ecology—and sits at the doorstep of Acadia National Park.

Still, the college has long been a leader in sustainability, achieving carbon neutrality in 2007 and divesting the school’s endowment from fossil fuels in 2013. Despite those achievements, College of the Atlantic President Darron Collins said that the school’s most important element of its sustainability work is student involvement.

“If you’re going to rank institutions based on pure kilowatt hours derived from solar panels, we’re a small institution so University of California is going to destroy us in that ranking,” Collins said. “But when you get rankings that try to get to student learning and what student motivations are, I think you’re going to find it hard to come up with a college that does that better and and more thoroughly or thoughtfully than College of the Atlantic.”

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