According to statistics compiled by the Center for Campus Fire Safety, close to 90 college students have died in on and off-campus fires in the United States since January of 2000. How can that number be so high, and what can be done to prevent more student deaths in the future?

We believe that a large part of the problem stems from a lack of consciousness and information about fire safety issues on college campuses. Prospective college students and their parents often are not aware of what constitutes a fire safe college campus, so they do not know what questions to ask school administrators about their fire safety measures when they visit their campuses. Others just assume that every room in an on-campus student residence is covered by an automatic sprinkler system, and that when students move into off-campus residences as upperclassmen, they will have been well educated by the college about the fire prevention, detection, and suppression features any dwelling they live in ought to have. Too often, it takes a fatal campus fire for these families to realize that assuming such things about a college is a mistake. Colleges have varying levels of fire safety. Not every residence hall on every college is completely covered by sprinklers, and not every college devotes the same amount of time per student to fire safety education.

To address this information gap, The Princeton Review has teamed up with the Center for Campus Fire Safety to collect from U.S. colleges statistics on how well prepared they are to prevent and respond to campus fires. The results of that data collection are our Fire Safety Ratings. This page explains how to find the Fire Safety Rating for any college listed on PrincetonReview.com.

1. Go to a particular college's summary page. You may do this in a variety of ways, e.g., by typing a college's name in the search box on the left hand side of any page and clicking "Go," then clicking on the appropriate link in the search results, or by performing a Counselor-o-Matic search and clicking on one of the resulting colleges' links.
2. Once on a college's summary page, click on the "STATISTICS" link on the left-hand side of the page.
3. At this point, if you are not already a registered user of PrincetonReview.com and signed in to the site, you will be prompted to either register or sign in. Registration is fast and free. Once you have signed in or registered, you will be redirected to the "General Info" page under "STATISTICS." If you are already registered and signed in, you will go directly to this page when you click on "STATISTICS."
4. In the left hand column, click on "Campus Life" under STATISTICS.
5. On the next page, under the "Campus Life" heading, the first two pieces of data are the Quality of Life Rating and the Fire Safety Rating. You may click on either one of these links to go to our "User's Guide to our College Ratings," which describes how we produce each of our various ratings.