Southern Vermont College

Karen Gross is the President of Southern Vermont College, a small, private, affordable, four-year college located in Bennington, Vermont; 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 becoming SVC’s president. Her academic area of expertise is consumer finance, over-indebtedness and community economic development. President Gross is the past President and CEO of an educational non-profit organization that designs, implements and studies programs to provide financial empowerment skills to consumers. She has served as a consultant to governmental and non-profit organizations, including US Department of Education, United Way NYC, the Council on Legal Educational Opportunity and the Campaign for Working Families. She sits on several boards, including Campus Compact (a national service learning organization), The Sage Colleges, and Association of Vermont Independent Colleges Executive Committee. She also sits on 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, President Gross taught at the high school and college levels and practiced law in Chicago and New York.

President Gross has earned a national and international reputation as a scholar, teacher, administrator and community leader dedicated to improving the lives of those less privileged. 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 and Michigan Law Review. Her most recent writing appears in Change: Magazine of Higher Learning, Chronicle of Higher Education, Behavioral Sciences and the Law, Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Journal of Student Affairs. Her prize-winning book, Failure and Forgiveness, was published by Yale University Press. She has also published on topics such as student success and consumer finance in magazines, newspapers and journals including the LA Times, Albany Times Union, Chicago Tribune, University Business, New England Journal of Higher Education, and InsideHigherEd.com. She writes a blog called Higher Education Matters, which appears at http://blogs.svc.edu/president/.

Professor Gross speaks frequently in the U.S. and abroad. She is also regularly invited to speak on television and radio and is frequently quoted in the print media. She has served as an outside tenure and grant reviewer in the U.S. and Canada. She has testified before local and federal governmental bodies, including most recently the Vermont Higher Education Caucus, Vermont House of Representatives Education Committee, New York City Department of Consumer Affairs and the Federal Financial Literacy and Education Commission. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including 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.

Presidential Speeches and Articles
SVC Celebrates Inauguration