New Website Will Rate Colleges for LGBT-Friendliness

A fellow blogger alerted me to a new site that will soon be coming on line which should be rather interesting. The site will allow students and alumni to rate their colleges and universities on the basis of their LGBT-friendliness. A more detailed description can be found at http://topoutcolleges.wordpress.com/, including a plan to launch a marketing blitz aimed directly at current and prospective college students. Here are a few details on the site:

"Essentially, we will contact virtually every LGBT campus organization we can get our hands on," says Brent Robinson, owner of TopOutColleges.com.

The site lists the “Top 500″ most LGBT-friendly American colleges as rated on a five-star scale by college students and alumni, according to their overall experiences with campus issues, i.e. life in the dorms, campus LGBT events, contact with campus LGBT groups, etc. As students and alumni rate their colleges, those rankings change and are displayed in real-time. Colleges are also ranked and rated by their state, region, and conference for easy searching and organization for prospective students researching their future college. Additionally, each college has its own ranking page, where students can post event announcements and stories of their LGBT experiences on their campus.

The ultimate goal of this campaign is to improve LGBT-friendliness on college campuses, ” says Robinson. ”As users start to vote, it will become evident which colleges tend to float near the top, and which fail to make the cut. That is the kind of information that LGBT prospective students are looking for, especially since the ratings are coming directly from the students at that college. When prospective students start choosing certain colleges over others, those bypassed colleges will start to take notice, and hopefully will want to do something about it. That is why it’s so important that students get on the site and vote, and we feel that 1 million votes is a great start.”