Context
In the process of developing this project, several other, similar projects were examined and considered. We began by looking closely at the Sierra Club and STARS assessments-- two projects designed to carefully track the sustainability of higher education institutions. While other personal assessment and reduction efforts focus primarily on households and individuals and look only at consumption of resources, higher education assessments allow for a focus on initiatives, student engagement on a community-wide level, and educational efforts. The issue with Marlboro and these assessments is, of course, its size. Marlboro operates in many ways like an extensive household, but is, of course, an educational institution. We decided that the most effective way to assess Marlboro's sustainability would be to create an assessment crafted specifically for Marlboro and tailored to its unique needs. This assessment (as introduced more fully elsewhere in this introduction), will serve to highlight the strengths of Marlboro as well as highlight the areas in which Marlboro needs improvement. Of course, this does not make Marlboro easily comparable to other colleges, so some kind of comparison of our assessment to other institutions' efforts is necessary.
In looking closely at the Sierra Club survey, we found several holes that we felt prevented this from being the best or most accurate way to assess Marlboro College. While Sierra asked careful questions in all relevant categories, it seemed to ignore our strongest asset in terms of sustainability-- total resource use. Sierra Club also made several assumptions that were disconcerting: the assumption that construction and landscaping are a reality of life on every college campus, that vegetarian and vegan options are always more sustainable than non-vegetarian options, and the presence of a core curriculum. While these are all true things some of the time, they are certainly not true all the time, and not always true at Marlboro.
The STARS assessment, in contrast, was very comprehensive, but focused on sustainability in larger terms than just environmental sustainability. Many of the figures in this survey were also tailored to larger universities, and the scoring system provided more consistency with the distribution of a final score, but also less flexibility in terms of fitting the survey to Marlboro specifically. Because it is so comprehensive, though, it allows us to highlight most of our positive aspects even when some of its questions are inappropriate for our scale. Ultimately we decided that STARS, because of its incredibly detailed questions, would be the best amalgamated measure to adapt our data to, in order to compare ourselves with other colleges and universities across the country.
