College to join rating system based on sustainability

Author: Cloe Shasha

Middlebury College will be participating in a nationwide effort to develop and provide feedback on a proposed comprehensive rating system that colleges can use to evaluate their sustainability and compare their environmental practices to those of other schools. Although ratings themselves will not be given to participants in the pilot program, Middlebury will have a role in shaping the final assessment system.

The Sustainability Assessment, Tracking and Rating System (STARS) is entering a pilot phase in which participating colleges like Middlebury will attempt to gain credits towards a sustainability rating by measuring practices at the College while providing feedback on the effectiveness and efficiency of the system.

"In parallel with our doing the project, we'll be participating in feedback conferences with other schools in which we'll share suggestions about how to make this a better final version which will be available in January 2009 or shortly later," said Campus Sustainability Coordinator Jack Byrne.

The STARS program is being coordinated by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). AASHE aims to create a standardized system in which schools can establish and raise their sustainability rating by measuring and proving progress on key sustainability questions such as the strength of a college recycling program and whether an institution directs its investments towards sustainable ventures.

According to Byrne, AASHE requested the help of colleges to test the pilot program at nearly the same time that the Middlebury College Environmental Council was looking for a rating system that it could use to evaluate the sustainability of Middlebury's practices.

"There has been a lot of interest in the higher education community in how to track progress towards sustainability," said Byrne. "There are assessments in the business and government communities, but none are very appropriate for the higher education community. For the past couple of years, there have been a group of people working with AASHE to create a tracking tool. As the tool became more refined, AASHE put out a call for colleges to help test it."

In order to establish and improve their ratings, schools will have to earn credits dealing with three sections: education and research, operations and administration, and finance. The STARS pilot system has been designed to give a greater amount of credits to sustainable outcomes than for institutional shifts towards sustainability. AASHE believes that schools that earn a high rating could receive marketing benefits, and that such benefits would give institutions an incentive to become more sustainable.

The pilot program will be divided into two phases. Phase one will take place this spring and will deal with the refinement and development of the operations category and half of the administration and finance category. The second phase will begin in fall 2008 and will focus on education and research.

Middlebury faces challenges in gaining credits. According to Sustainability Assistant Austin Davis, those involved with the survey may have to confront issues including the lack of a centralized purchasing program among the departments, the absence of a campus-wide requirement to use energy efficient products and the lack of a course requirement dealing with sustainable practices.

Organizers of Middlebury's involvement foresee positive outcomes from an early encounter with an environmental rating system. "I think the best thing this will do is to spark a conversation about sustainability in the classroom," Byrne said. "This is an exercise in self-reflection. It challenges us in ways we may not have thought of before."

Moreover, Byrne believes that Middlebury may gain an advantage in later versions of the survey by gaining experience with its intricacies and requirements early on. "As a school participating in the pilot, the final version should be very straightforward for us since we'd already have done so much with the pilot," said Byrne.