Progress Seen in College Sustainability

As Elia Powers reports in Inside Higher Ed, the Sustainable Endowments Institute's second College Sustainability Report Card demonstrates progress in campus sustainability, especially in a variety of operations area. For example, in just one year the number of campuses reporting green building policies rose from 48 to 69 percent:

But the report notes that shareholder engagement and endowment transparency are still lagging. The engagement category measures how colleges conduct shareholder proxy voting, noting that about one in eight colleges has an advisory committee or shareholder responsibility committee, and 13 percent have a committee of several stake holders (students, faculty, staff) to inform trustees’ moves on shareholder proxy resolutions.

More than half of the institutions received a flunking grade in endowment transparency, which looks at how colleges control information about the investment holdings of their endowments. About one in four colleges makes its list of endowment holdings available to the campus, a modest improvement over the previous report’s findings, Orlowski said.