Two sources attempted to rank the top colleges in ‘LGBT friendliness’ and turned up with two wildly different results. Maybe these lists say more about how bogus these college rankings are, or even the biases of Campus Pride and the Princeton Review, than it does about the ‘tolerance’ of the colleges surveyed.

Greg Piper at the College Fix has the story:

Rival ‘LGBT-Friendly’ College Ranking Systems Give Starkly Different Results

Chances are you’ve seen news coverage of The Princeton Review’s new rankings for colleges in dozens of categories, released two weeks ago, or perhaps a college bragging about its high placement. The test-preparation and admissions consulting company, which isn’t affiliated with Princeton University, bases its rankings on surveys of 130,000 students at 379 “top colleges.”

Categories run the gamut from best college library (University of Chicago) and best college dorms (Washington University) to most conservative students (Texas A&M) and most liberal (Sarah Lawrence).

The rankings also measure campuses for how “LGBT-Friendly” they are. Stanford gets the top spot in that category.

What you might have missed is a similar list of the most LGBT-friendly campuses in America, released on Friday by the LGBT college network Campus Pride.

This may surprise you, depending on how credulous you are when it comes to rankings of any kind that purport to be objective: There’s barely any overlap between the two lists.

Student Surveys vs. ‘LGBT Experts’

Our friends at Campus Reform have a quick list of the top 20 LGBT-friendly campuses from The Princeton Review (whose own site requires visitors to hand over reams of personal information to see the full rankings).

The LGBT friendliness of campuses on The Princeton Review list is based on a single question: “Do students, faculty, and administrators at your college treat all persons equally regardless of their sexual orientations and gender identity/expression?”

The Campus Pride list, in contrast, “is based on the final responses to the Campus Pride Index, a national benchmarking tool which self-assesses LGBT-friendly policies, programs and practices,” its website says. It distinguishes itself from the competition:

Unlike the Princeton Review LGBT rankings, the Campus Pride Index is based in research on policy, program and practice and is conducted “for and by” LGBT experts in the field of higher education.

In theory, the Campus Pride list – 50 schools in no particular order of “friendliness” – could include every school on The Princeton Review list, which ranks only the top 20.

What’s surprising is there are exactly four schools that show up on both lists:  Macalester College in Minnesota;  Oberlin College in Ohio;  Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C. (a gay mecca of the South);  and Yale in Connecticut.