When I first reported to the University of Missouri, the first thing I heard was that it had been designated the nation’s top party school by respected authorities in the field. I’m not sure anybody knew who those authorities were, but it didn’t matter; we wanted to believe so we did. In the same vein, everyone believed Jim Lowe’s “Green Door” was inspired by a notorious Mizzou dive called the Shack. The Shack’s door wasn’t even green—but word was they’d painted it after the song came out to deflect notoriety.
The Princeton Review says it bases its rankings on a survey of 136,000 students who are asked a total of 80 questions. As explained by the Review, the questions pertaining to partying—and to the opposite ranking of top “stone-cold sober schools”— sound almost primitive:
