Illinois State Part of Campus Sustainability Rating Pilot Program

Illinois State University is among more than 90 colleges and universities selected to participate in the pilot phase of a rating system for sustainability in higher education developed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). 

The self-assessment system, called STARS (Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System), will launch on Feb. 4.  Participating colleges and universities will test the system over the course of 2008 and provide feedback to AASHE that will inform STARS version 1.0, planned for release in spring 2009.

For the last several years, Illinois State University has been actively working to reduce the campus’ environmental impacts. “We are pleased to have been selected as a participant in the STARS pilot program,” said Enid Cardinal, Illinois State’s sustainability coordinator and a member of the STARS technical advisory committee. “It will give us the opportunity to evaluate our efforts thus far and help us to determine where we want to go in the future.  Being a part of the development of such an important tool is very exciting.” 

The participating campuses were selected to represent a wide range of institutional types, sizes, and geography. They include public and private schools, community colleges and research universities. STARS is designed to help gauge the progress of colleges and universities toward sustainability in all sectors, from governance and operations to academics and community engagement; enable meaningful comparisons across institutions as well as benchmarking within institutions; create incentives for continuous improvement toward sustainability; and facilitate information sharing about sustainability practices and performance in higher education.

Given the rapid growth of sustainability initiatives at institutions of higher education in North America, measuring and assessing progress toward sustainability goals has become increasingly important. While many institutions have undertaken sustainability assessments and while a variety of assessment tools are available, there is currently no system that translates disparate sustainability indicators into a single metric that enables both institutional benchmarking and easy comparison across a large number of campuses in terms of overall level of achievement.

The system is similar to the LEED (Leadership in Energy Environmental Design) green building rating system. STARS, however, is applied to an entire campus rather than a single building or set of buildings and evaluates social responsibility as well as environmental stewardship.  Campuses may earn credits in three categories: curriculum and research; operations; and administration and finance.  Within each category are subsections of credits, ranging from purchasing and buildings to investment and planning.

For more information about STARS, see: www.aashe.org/stars