Q&A: Dr Karen Gross, President Southern Vermont College

Karen Gross is the President of Southern Vermont College, a small, private, four-year college located in Bennington. She was appointed as the college’s 8th president in 2006. SVC offers a career launching education with a liberal arts core, and many of the college’s students enter the fields of healthcare, criminal justice, entrepreneurship and social service.

President Gross also holds a position as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at New York Law School, where she was a tenured law professor for more than two decades prior to coming to SVC. Her academic area of expertise is consumer finance, over-indebtedness and community economic development.

Gross is the past president and CEO of an educational non-profit organization in New York City that designs, implements and studies programs to improve the financial literacy skills of consumers. She has served as a consultant to non-profit organizations, including United Way NYC, the Council on Legal Educational Opportunity and the Campaign for Working Families. She sits on several boards, including Vermont Campus Compact, the Bennington County Industrial Corporation, the Coalition for Debtor Education and the Marlboro College Graduate Center. She also sits on the Advisory Council of Office of Financial Empowerment of the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs and the NCAA Division III Presidents’ Advisory Council.

Raised in New England, she is a cum laude graduate of Smith College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a cum laude graduate of Temple University School of Law, having spent her final year of law school at the University of Chicago. Prior to entering legal academia, Gross taught at the high school and college levels and practiced law in Chicago and New York.

She has a special research interest in women and money and student debt loads. Her legal scholarly work has been published in leading journals including the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Michigan Law Review, and Notre Dame Law Review. Her most recent scholarly works on financial literacy education and student indebtedness appear in Behavioral Sciences and the Law, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Student Affairs, Financial Counseling and Planning Journal, and Leadership Exchange. Her prize-winning book, “Failure and Forgiveness,” was published by Yale University Press.

She has also written pieces published in magazines, newspapers and journals including the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, University Business, New England Journal of Higher Education, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, InsideHigherEd.com and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the 1999 Legal Aid Society Pro Bono Award, the 2002 New York State Bar Association’s President’s Pro Bono Service Award, the 2004 AAUW Education Foundation Senior Scholars Special Commendation of Honor and the Westchester Community College 2006 Women’s History Month Honoree.

VBM: This is a really beautiful campus. Could you give me a little of the history of Southern Vermont College?

Gross: It is beautiful. The interesting thing for me is, when you look at our campus, you could not ask for a more breathtaking setting in which to learn. So from an academic perspective, you couldn’t have created a better situation.

The college was founded in 1926. It had a different name then. It was St. Joseph’s College for Business. It was primarily a college for the local community and did a lot of business education and secretarial education. It was a two-year institution. In 1970 it became a four-year institution and changed its name to Southern Vermont College.

VBM: Is there any relation to the St Joseph’s College in Rutland?

Gross: Yes. Actually there was a split, in essence, in the early 1970s, when this college, which had been run by the same order of nuns, decided to split the campuses and make the SVC campus independent and non-denominational and create St Joseph’s College in Rutland. So we have a fair amount of history with them.

VBM: What’s the history of these buildings?

Gross: The buildings themselves are the former home of Edward Everett, who was an industrialist. He made a significant fortune in bottle making and also in gas and oil. This was his summer home and one of three homes that he had. We’ve lovingly preserved it. It was built over a period of about 10 years. It’s on the National Historic Registry.

VBM: How did it come into the hands of, well, I guess the Church at first?

Gross: Originally, after Edward Everett lived here, it became a novitiate. When it got decommissioned as a novitiate, the college then traded this space for another space, which is now the Bennington School.

VBM: When St Joseph’s went to Rutland and SVC was established, that was in what year?

Gross: I think it was 1974.

VBM: What has happened in the 35 years since then?

Gross: The college always had a deep and abiding commitment to affordable education, which we are now calling affordable excellence, which is a four-year, career-launching education which is quite competitive with our state schools and is significantly lower than our private, collegiate neighbors. That’s a very important story.

It’s a college that has been committed since the very beginning to being small, intimate, personalized. To offering career launching education. For me, the link between being all that and being affordable is critical. Many of our students are the first ones in their family to attend college. To be able to have students attracted to this institution, and to be able to stay here for their undergraduate education, it’s really important that it be affordable.

VBM: How big is your student body?

Gross: Right now we have about 500 students. We’re not the smallest college in Vermont, but in terms of private, four-year liberal arts colleges, we’re on the small end. We’ll still grow. We want to get to about 750 students, and we should get there within the next three to four years. As we grow, we’ve also done some growth on the campus. The most significant thing, and you probably saw it as you drove up the driveway, was the new living and learning community across from the pond. That’s the first major new building on campus in 17 years.

VBM: How large is the campus?

Gross: The campus is 372 acres. We have an athletic facility, a soccer field, a baseball field and a rugby practice field, which are on different parts of the land. Then there are five old dorms, together with a computer lab, a radiology technology suite, and then a dining hall. The new building is a multi-use building. It has 110 beds, two science labs, a conference room and an atrium. Then we have the mansion and the carriage house. We’re also using offsite space at the Bennington Center for the Arts for classrooms. It’s a beautiful, beautiful space.

VBM: How many students live on campus? I’m sure you have some local students who probably commute from home.

Gross: That’s right, and we have some non-traditional students. This coming year, with the new residential hall, we plan on having 330 students living on campus. Right now we have a little over 240.

VBM: What are you academic offerings?

Gross: The umbrella is a career launching education with a liberal arts core. Then we have five divisions within which we run our academic programs. We have strengths in certain areas. Health care is one of the primary areas where we have a number of students. Nursing, radiologic technology, and health care management and advocacy. Then we have a criminal justice division, which includes the traditional policing, but also covers corrections, juvenile justice, corrective justice and the courts and prisons and restorative justice. So it’s criminal justice broadly defined.

The third major area is business. The college has a traditional core, and we have a new entrepreneurial program where the students launch their own businesses and run them while they’re in college. We also have a regular business division and a sports management program.

We have a social science area, and a very strong group of students that go into the social welfare arena with different kinds of organizations. And we have a creative writing program.

The bulk of the students are concentrated in the first three areas. Interestingly, and perhaps not shockingly, those are areas where there are real careers in the employment market of today and for the years to come.

VBM: Nursing in particular seems to be a major employment area.

Gross: All of health care is. Vermont is the second oldest state, I don’t mean in its history, but in the age of its population. Bennington County is the oldest county in terms of the age of its population. So it makes some sense for us to focus on programs that allow us to send our students out into the community to be engaged participants.

VBM: I’ve interviewed Governor Douglas many times for VBM, back to when he was just a candidate. One thing we always seem to talk about is how can Vermont encourage more students to go to college here, and then, once they graduate, how do we keep them here. Could you address that?

Gross: Sure. First of all my background is in community economic development. Asset building in low income communities. So the issues you’re talking about, workforce development, engagement between collegiate campuses and the larger community, is part of what I’ve been thinking about for the better part of a decade. So it matters to me that we are not an isolated ivory tower. That we engage actively and regularly with the local community and the broader regional community, that’s a very big part of what we do. We’re in essence an academic institution with porous walls.

Our students go out into the community and help improve it. One of the reasons to do that, in addition to its being wise as far as education, is that students do best with hands-on, experiential learning. Laboratory work is really what we’re doing. I just got a very large grant to increase the curriculum to include the laboratory component. Not just in the sciences. It’s not by accident that the areas that we concentrate on are ones where there are serious workforce needs. We’re trying to match up opportunities for our students to engage in the community here so that they stay in the Bennington area or in Vermont.

They’ve had opportunities to meet employers, to see job settings, to see the kind of work they would be able to do here, so that when the time comes for them to graduate, they segue in to the community.

Talking about partnerships and community links and community development, we kept that theme in mind when we constructed Hunter Hall and Greenberg Atrium, our first new building in 25 years. We used a local Bennington architectural firm, 90 percent of the service providers were within a 75 mile radius of Bennington, and 50 percent of the supplies were from vendors within a 75 mile radius of Bennington. This was an important statement about our belief in the community and its ongoing vitality.

One of the most interesting statistics I have is that the progression from high school to college in Vermont is very low. In fact, it’s the lowest of the New England states. That’s a troubling statistic, because nine out of the top 10 jobs in Vermont in the coming decade require a minimum of a bachelor’s degree. We have to work really hard to get more Vermont students into college. We do have the highest high school graduation rate in New England, but the lowest progression to college.

What that tells me is that we have to find ways for more students to become engaged in higher education. But when you really look behind the data, it isn’t enough for students to enter college, they have to graduate from college. So what we really should be measuring is our success at getting kids through the educational system, not just into the higher educational system.

VBM: You talked about increasing your student body by a few hundred students. Is that through expanding your course offerings, or expanding the ability of the college to physically handle more students?

Gross: From the time I got here, we will have, in essence, doubled the student population in a period of six years. Some of it is program growth. Both new programs and also expanding existing ones. Some of it also comes from doing a better job at keeping the students who come here. In other words, admissions isn’t only the students you bring in as part of your first year population or your transfer population. It’s also keeping the students that are here. So for me it’s both program growth and improving the living and learning community in which are students are engaged. That for me, the creation of a true living and learning community here, is what animates what I do.

VBM: What is your background? How did you find your way here to SVC?

Gross: I spent the last three decades in education in one form or another. But I’ve been a tenured law professor at New York Law School, where I specialized in indebtedness in the consumer financial market.

VBM: I think I have too, only from the opposite side, I’m sure!

Gross: My area of expertise is actually quite in demand these days.

VBM: I can imagine.

Gross: The consumer financial market, predatory lending, asset building in low income communities, that’s what I studied and taught.

VBM: Did you start as a lawyer or go directly into teaching?

Gross: I started out as a lawyer. I did corporate restructuring and restructured financially troubled businesses.

VBM: You grew up where?

Gross: Outside of Boston in Lexington, MA.

VBM: And went to school where?

Gross: I did my undergraduate work at Smith and Dartmouth, and I did my graduate work at Temple University and the University of Chicago.

VBM: Did you start your career working in New York?

Gross: I practiced law in Chicago and then in New York. So I understand the world of finance. I understand indebtedness. I started writing increasingly about education as a tool for empowerment, about financial literacy education and student indebtedness. A number of people said to me, "Stop writing and start doing." You can have all these ideas about what should happen to students, and opportunities for students and how they can finance their education in a way that is meaningful, so go do it.

VBM: So how did you progress into becoming a college president?

Gross: I would tell you in a joking sense that I was convinced that we didn’t need more lawyers, we needed more thoughtful people. That meant that I had to move out of legal education into undergraduate education. I ran an educational non-profit in New York City, which specialized in financial literacy education. It was really about empowering people to learn about the system of financial markets and wiser financial choices for themselves and their families.

As I started writing a lot about education as a tool for empowerment, people started noticing what I was writing. So I was approached by a headhunter.

VBM: To come here?

Gross: To move into leading a college. Then there was a particular person who said to me, "This would be a perfect place for you." It combines the kind of education that I’ve written about and thought about. It’s small enough to enable you to do the things I’m so interested in doing.

VBM: You came here when?

Gross: In August of 2006. It has been a remarkable experience.

VBM: Did your family move here with you?

Gross: My husband commutes from New York, although he’s now teaching at Albany Law School. He’s a retired corporate securities lawyer. He was teaching at a law school in New York City. Our son is completing his PhD abroad at the London School of Economics. We have ties to Vermont. My son went to high school at Stratton Mountain School. We’ve had a home in Vermont for close to 15 years, so coming here was not as much of a transition as some people might think. I used to take sabbaticals here and write. I did some of my best thinking in Vermont standing on mountainsides.

VBM: I’m the editor of The Message for the Week, and we cover Stratton Mountain School all the time. Was your son a skier or boarder?

Gross: He was a downhill ski racer. He stopped racing after his first year of college and finished his undergraduate education at the University of Chicago.

VBM: With the current economy and trying to afford a higher education, what would you like to say to potential students and their parents?

Gross: I talk a lot about financing a college education and thinking about being financially literate in these times, learning to speak money’s language. In one of life’s ironies, I thought I had two careers that would be on parallel tracks, but in fact, because of the economy, they’ve merged. I hadn’t expected that, but in many ways it’s been a fruitful synergy. I jokingly said to the board of trustees that as much as I like literature, it’s a very good time to have a president whose expertise is indebtedness.

There are no shortage of issues facing higher education and the capacity of families to finance their student’s undergraduate and graduate education. But there is one investment that has not lost value in this economy, and that’s education. It’s a very important message that tends to get lost, because newspaper headlines follow the "if it bleeds it leads" mentality and people are getting scared about the capacity to finance an education. But students won’t be able to succeed in the job market of the future unless they have a minimum of an undergraduate education.

The really hard question is how do you make that happen? How can you help students and their parents so that they can finance an undergraduate education? So we start with that issue.

Tuition, room and board is expensive at many private institutions. It’s a hard issue and it’s not easily solved. We have tuition, room and board for next year, for $27,520. With discounting, which is what most private institutions do, we are competitive with state colleges. That’s by design. We want to be able to make ourselves affordable to a wide range of students.

Having said that, there are other institutions that have much more complicated and much more expensive infrastructure, which makes the cost of tuition, room and board much harder. So cost is one piece of it.

The student financial aid piece is another complicated story. The good news is that the current government administration has increased the amount of aid available to vulnerable students. That’s very good for us as an institution because many of our students are Pell eligible, which is the government grant that’s available to the most vulnerable families. Over 50 percent of our students are the first in their families to attend a four-year college. Forty percent of our students are Pell eligible. If you look at the same levels at the traditional elite institutions, the number of Pell eligible students is between 12 and 17 percent. I’m proud of who our students are, so I’m working very hard to make sure that they end up with a degree and with the kind of debt that is capable of being serviced when they enter the job market.

One of the additional problems is that, as jobs become scarcer, and salaries are not increasing a lot, you don’t want students to graduate with debt that they can’t service from the income that they get from their employment opportunities. So it’s really important to keep debt at a level that’s manageable when students graduate. Otherwise you saddle them with a burden that won’t be satisfied in the near term.

So when you look at the average debt of students in Vermont when they emerge, the average debt from a private college is about $38,000. Our students graduate with around $28,000 of debt on average, when you combine federal loans, state loans, parent plus loans. I’m not saying that $28,000 is a small number. It isn’t, but it’s less than at some of our collegiate neighbors, and we’re working at that.

The debt matters to me, but there is another piece to this. Many students can’t close the gap in terms of the debt load, just by borrowing through the state or federal government or parent plus loans or private loans. Many students use a credit card as a way of helping close that gap. There are real risks with that. Increasingly, the kinds of credit cards that students are getting, and the interest rates that they are paying, make them somewhat complicated financially, and credit ratings, which are historically the major way we determine the price you pay for the credit you get, matter now more than ever. And your credit score not only impacts your access to credit and the price you pay for it, but it also is increasingly affecting employability and insurability. If you don’t have a good credit score, you’re going to pay more for the money you borrow but also you’re going to have trouble getting insurance and your employer is going to be looking at your credit score. So educational institutions owe it to their students to help them so that they don’t emerge with unbridled amounts of debt or credit scores that disable them from participating actively when they leave here.

So for me, in one of those moments when my prior live and my current life converge, I care very much about ensuring that our students and their families understand the consumer financial market and make as wise fiscal choices as they can. This economy has put a magnifying glass on all of those issues and made what were already important issues into critically important issues.

VBM: Are there any aspects of the new credit card bill that will address this area for students?

Gross: The credit card legislation has taken different forms depending on whether it’s on the House or Senate side. There are also a set of rules that came out of the Federal Trade Commission. They are all designed to improve the quality of the credit card that consumers get, so that people are not as easily taken advantage of. That’s the good news.

It doesn’t solve the problem of ensuring that students can borrow only limited amounts on their cards. It doesn’t solve the problem of how to make college more economically manageable. What it does is solve the problem that you won’t be taken advantage of as much when you use a credit card.

VBM: I’ve always felt that one of the responsibilities of government was to protect its citizens, and when a business can charge 20 or 25 or 30 percent interest rates, and increase those and add penalties on people who are already struggling financially - why aren’t we being protected from that sort of predatory lending?

Gross: Credit cards are reverse Robin Hood. The least able to pay are those who pay the most. That offsets the lower costs to better off individuals. Now, to be fair, it’s based on risk-based pricing. The theory is that the riskier you are as a borrower, the more you should pay because you are more likely to default. But we overprice for risk. We clearly overprice for risk. I worry that students get taken advantage of in the consumer financial market..

For example, we don’t allow companies to offer credit cards to our new students. We specifically disallow that. That is an important statement about this institution. But nationwide, we don’t teach college students effectively about money and finance. In fact, we offer most of that education during orientation, which is hardly a teachable moment. Most students are trying to find their way to the bathroom or the classroom or trying to get along with their roommate, and they’re not focusing on their financial lives. Campuses should be doing a better job of helping educate both students and their parents. We’ve been employing a series of programs like that, both on and off campus, to help with that.

VBM: What short-term changes do you see in education?

Gross: One of the changes that I’m seeing is that there used to be a dichotomy between the liberal art institution and a career launching institution. Many people said you either have one or the other, and I don’t think that that is true. In fact, I think you can and should have both. When you ask employers what skill sets they want in their employees, they are looking for skills grounded in the liberal arts. Team work and collaboration, oral communication skills, quantitative skills, information literacy, and the capacity to write well. Those are skills born out of a thoughtful liberal arts core. So one of the short term things happening is that many institutions are recognizing the need to be a career launching liberal arts institution.

Short term, people are also recognizing the need to teach the student of today, not the student we were when we were in college. Today’s students are technologically very savvy. They are living in a very different kind of world with very different kinds of problems. They come with a very different set of learning experiences and exposures. We’re going to have to pay attention to how to teach this generation of students in ways that are meaningful for them. We have to focus on hands-on experiential learning, opportunities to engage, substituting depth for breadth. We have to think about technology and the ways technology can help learning, but also to educate students how to manage the plethora of information that exists and to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate information. They have more information now at their fingertips than many of us could ever have researched in a library over years and years. But when you have that much information, you need to know how to get through it. So when we think about literacy skills, I think we need to think about information literacy.

VBM: You can Google something, and get as much garbage as useful and accurate information.

Gross: You need to be able to sort it. You almost have to be able to be a forensic investigator to be able to distinguish between what is real and what isn’t. Another short-term thing that we have to be aware of is the add-on costs of education. Books are expensive for our students. If they are too expensive, they either don’t buy them, they share them with others, or they read them in the library. But if we want to keep students engaged with material, $700 or $800 for books each semester is very hard for students. So we have to be rethinking some of those costs.

VBM: Can something like the Kindle be used for text books?

Gross: It’s interesting. We are launching a Kindle project on campus. We got a grant. I’ve been walking around with a Kindle for about two months. The newest Kindle is a textbook Kindle. We’ll likely launch a course this fall using Kindle, where the materials will be downloaded on the Kindle. It’s cost effective for that semester, but even more so when you use if for multiple courses. The Kindle we’ve looked at is $359, the books that you get on it are less expensive than if you bought them at a bookstore. Some books are at a very low cost. Professors can download their own material onto a Kindle, so a student can have in one place a technologically very sophisticated instrument.

It reads to you, you can take notes on it, you can highlight material, you can get definitions of words, you can search on it, you can get newspapers and magazines and you can even create material on it. So that’s a project we can find a way to do.

Let me give you another example. We’re creating a simulation laboratory for our health care students. They have computerized patients where health care students can engage with them, try out medical interventions, be videotaped to see how they are doing, be critiqued and then go back and do it again.

VBM: And all without endangering anyone’s life.

Gross: Right. When our nursing students confront someone who is about to have a heart attack in a hospital, they have to step back. For good reason, so that the professionals can take over. But in the simulation laboratory, our students step forward and do the work.

We’re also exploring other ways to use the simulation lab. For example, we’re planning to engage in a simulation of various kinds of dementia, especially the kinds common to aging. So they can develop strategies to deal with an aging population that is exhibiting psychological behavior that is difficult to deal with. These are ways of taking advantage of technology to improve the quality of education and engage our students more actively.

The longer range issue for me is that educational institutions need to partner more. With other educational institutions, with the community, and with organizations within the community. If there ever were a message coming out of this economy, it’s that now is the time to leverage resources. It is not the time to be autonomous, button up the hatches and stay all by yourself. My experience tells me that when people become indebted, the natural strategy is to turn inward. In truth, you should do what is counter intuitive and reach outward. Find partners. If there is a silver lining to this economy, it’s that it is creating opportunities for people to partner together, who would never have partnered before.

Robert Smith is the editor of The Message for the Week, a weekly paper in Chester, and a freelance writer and photographer living in Westminster. He can be reached at robfs52@yahoo.com.