Students give UH-Manoa dubious honors in guide

Students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa give the school low marks for student happiness, administration and its libraries.

But the dorms aren’t like dungeons anymore, according to student surveys compiled by the Princeton Review for its annual best colleges guide.

UH-Manoa is listed in the guidebook for the first time in five years.

The Princeton Review’s annual best colleges guide is perhaps best known for its list of the top party schools in the country (The University of West Virginia is No. 1; UH-Manoa did not make that list.)

But it also ranks colleges in 61 other categories based on student survey results.

UH-Manoa stopped actively participating in the surveys after the 2009 guide listed the school as having "Dorms like Dungeons," "Long Lines and Red Tape" and "Professors Get Low Marks."

For this year’s edition, UH-Manoa administrators decided to encourage students to fill out the surveys.

But the results showed the students rank the school in the bottom 20 out of 377 schools for "Least Happy Students" (12th), "Administrators Get Low Marks" (14th) and "This is a Library?" (17th).

The rankings are based on how the 122,000 students surveyed nationwide answered the questions "Overall, how happy are you?" "Overall, how smoothly is your school run?" and "How do you rate your school’s library facilties?"

But while UH-Manoa didn’t get good grades from undergraduate students for the 2013 Best 377 Colleges guidebook, the campus has done well in other Princeton Review publications and is listed as among 322 Green Colleges for 2012. The William S. Richardson School of Law is also ranked by students as having the best environment for minority students and as having among the most diverse faculty.