Playboy's 2009 The Stats

	Bikini	Sex	Campus	Sports	Brains	Total
1 The University of Miami	20	17	20	12	20	89
2 University of Texas at Austin	15	13	19	16	16	79
3 San Diego State University	19	17	20	8	14	78
4 University of Florida	14	17	7	20	18	76
5 University of Arizona	15	18	12	12	14	71
6 University of Wisconsin	12	17	10	10	18	67
7 University of Georgia	13	18	6	13	16	66
8 Louisiana State University	13	13	6	16	14	62
9 University of Iowa	11	19	4	10	16	60
10 West Virginia University	9	20	4	11	13	57

For more than 20 years Playboy’s list of top party schools has fueled debate on campuses across the country. It has also spawned two myths we will now dispel. The first is that we put out a list of party schools every year. Not true—until now. Going forward, this will be an annual event. The second myth was propagated by your friends who bragged that their school was number one. Unless they matriculated at Chico State (in 1987), Arizona State (2002) or Wisconsin (2006), they were dead wrong. If they are currently at the University of Miami, however, visit them immediately. You can read the rest of this on the road trip.

We had an internal struggle trying to compare apples and keggers. How should we rank a Bowling Green bar crawl against a Rhode Island ripper? An event is what one makes of it. Our parties are covered by international media, but some of our favorite nights are spent with close friends and girlfriends. So we polled our models, staffers, campus reps, photographers and you (the traffic to our online poll almost crashed the server) about which schools get down. Then we determined the five categories crucial to the college experience. Even if you aren’t an applied-science major, college is indeed the time to experiment. You should also check out the scenery (the Bikini index), get involved in activities (Campus Life), go crazy in fandom (Sports), learn (Brains) and put a few notches on your dorm bedpost (Sex). From these categories we developed algorithms to decide the rankings. Think of this as a BCS rating, but unlike the BCS we welcome your input. If, say, you feel skiing schools were treated unfairly by the Bikini index, noise from you may change next year’s calculations. Here’s how our research staff ran the numbers: Each category was weighted so the school with the highest score in the category would receive 20 points.

BIKINI: We took the highest average temperature on campus in May + the number of days of sunshine + the number of tanning salons near campus + the number of cosmetic surgeons and multiplied that by the girl percentage from the guy-to-girl ratio, then added the number of nursing majors and our rank of their cheerleaders.

SEX: To get this figure we used the ranking from the Trojan Sexual Health Report Card (if none was given, the median was used) + the number of empty study rooms at a random hour in the library (the best place to have sex on campus if your roommate is home) + the numerical value of the College Prowler Strictness Score (A+=98, A=95, A-=92, etc).

CAMPUS LIFE: A beer is only as good as the company you drink it with, so we used these formulas: 2 x (the number of bars + the number of liquor stores + the gallons of beer consumed in the state each year) = N. Enrollment /(the number of clubs + the number of Greek organizations) = Q. Each school’s Q was then subtracted from the highest Q in the set to get Z. 100/N + 100/Z gave us our number.

SPORTS: We counted only the past four years, since current seniors started. (Note: The 2009 NCAA Basketball Tournament occurred after we went to press.) We took the capacity of the largest stadium – enrollment + (the number of times men’s basketball or football made a bowl game or NCAA Division I Tourney x 1,000) + (the number of times either men’s basketball or football won its conference x 5,000) + (the number of times men’s basketball or football won a national championship x 10,000).

BRAINS: We took the average GPA (if none was reported, we used the average of all the schools) + (the freshman retention rate / the number of students for each professor) + (the Princeton Review academic rating /10).

Did your school not crack the top 10? The rest of the list is at PlayboyU.com.