The Princeton Review’s “2026 Guide to Green Colleges” distinguished Creighton University on its list of 388 environmentally responsible schools, with a score of 86 out of 99.
This is a recognition that the university has received on and off since 2008, though — until last year when The Princeton Review released their 2025 list — it had been a few years since Creighton made the cut.
“[Making the list is] dependent [on] … who were the people around who were willing and able to make sure we were reporting data out. And so, for a long time, it was Facilities who would send out our information, and that would lead to our inclusion. …There were just breaks in the data, and so there were years that we didn’t,” Andrew Baruth, Ph.D., the director of the Office of Sustainability Programs, said. “When I took over the sustainability job [in January 2023], we hadn’t been recognized. So, then my office just made sure that we were back on that list of getting recognized for the green colleges.”
Baruth and April Thompson, the project and reporting coordinator for the Office of Sustainability Programs, worked together to gather data about Creighton’s sustainability metrics and report it.
“One of my first goals in the office was to make sure that we had good metrics of everything that was happening,” Baruth said. “As an experimental physicist, I needed to know my baseline before I knew what to put my focus on. … [Thompson and I] relaunched the office together. And so yeah, we were out finding academic data, engagement data, operations data, waste data, whatever we could get our hands on just so we had a sense for how campus was working.”
They’ve continued collecting and reporting this data, leading to Creighton’s return to the list of green colleges.
The data shows how well Creighton is doing at being a sustainable campus, according to Baruth, and this second consecutive recognition from The Princeton Review is a testament to that.
According to the 2024-2025 impact report from the Office of Sustainability Programs, the university collected 18.6 tons of food waste that were processed into compost last academic year, donated 16 truckloads of move-out items and installed 186 geothermal wells to campus to heat and cool the new sophomore residence hall. An additional 1.4 tons of compost were collected over the summer, according to Baruth.
Baruth said the university has the resources for people to be sustainable, but it’s up to the Creighton community to implement them. A spring 2025 survey of 1,300 students, faculty and staff from the university’s Omaha campus found that 81.2% of respondents think Creighton does a good job implementing sustainable initiatives, but Baruth said fewer respondents said they were willing and able to engage in these initiatives.
To increase this engagement, the Office of Sustainability Programs received a grant from Canon USA, Baruth said. Using this money, they launched the “You ARE Sustainable Creighton” campaign.
The office uses the branding Sustainable Creighton, and “You ARE Sustainable Creighton” aims to help expand this branding into encouraging the Creighton community to be more active in sustainable initiatives.
“Whether you’re a student, whether you’re faculty, whether you’re staff, alumni, friend, family, you have opportunities to engage with being a more sustainable kind of person at Creighton through our programs,” Baruth said.
One of these programs is the Sustainable Creighton Office Certification, which, according to the impact report, was earned by 31 offices across the university last academic year. Offices must complete at least 16 actions towards sustainability to receive this certificate.
A lot of the opportunities for sustainability on campus are directly for students, including the Eco-Reps program.
Eco-Reps are students who are given a stipend to promote and work towards sustainability on campus. They do this through programs in the residence halls, supporting events like Christmas at Creighton and peer-to-peer interaction.
“We launched that program with the goal that if students are into this, we want them to have a community to join and feel a part of and do real things — do real things that have been thought through by the university at the highest levels of what makes sense to kind of make [campus] more sustainable,” Baruth said.
Students also have the opportunity to take advantage of the Creighton Student Sustainability Action Fund, which finances student-driven ideas and programs to promote sustainability on campus. One project financed by this action fund is a bike repair station, which Baruth said will be installed in front of the Reinert Alumni Memorial Library later this academic year.
“Our office is here to accelerate your thoughts,” Baruth said. “… Students can apply for money if they have a cool project idea. This can be as simple as an event … [like] a book club or [saying] ‘let’s go watch a movie together’ or ‘let’s learn how to sew.’ These are some of the things we’ve done in the past year. It can be bigger things. … I think students have cool ideas when they’re on campus, … [and] what we’ve been trying to do is empower them.”
The action fund is run by students — it’s students who make the proposals and students who vote on whether or not to approve them.
“I think that’s really cool. There aren’t a ton of opportunities in higher ed where students get to just do it all,” Baruth said.
Baruth said he felt good about the direction of sustainability on campus.
“It’s crazy to me that I will be coming up on my third year in the role and we finally have a pretty clear vision of where to go. … I use the phrase ‘hope through action,’” he said. “I don’t think we can have authentic hope unless we’re able to do something about it. And so, I want to empower campus to engage in sustainable ways.”