Position Profile
An invitation to apply for the position of
President
Middlebury College
Middlebury, Vermont
THE SEARCH
Middlebury College, one of the nation’s top institutions of higher learning based in the liberal arts and sciences, highly sought after by talented students and excellent faculty, and distinguished in its global reach and leadership in environmental sustainability, invites nominations and applications for the position of president. The president is the chief executive officer of Middlebury’s full constellation of academic programs, including Middlebury College, Middlebury Institute of International Studies, Middlebury Language Schools, Bread Loaf School of English, C.V. Starr Schools Abroad, and School of the Environment. Its network of programs aims to keep the world safer, smarter, and civically engaged through its leading role in contributing to global policy, pioneering language education, and training future leaders to lead lives of inquiry and understanding. The next president of Middlebury will strategically employ and organize the institution’s distinctive assets to best support its undergraduate and graduate populations and realize its full potential as a global leader in and model for 21st-century liberal arts and sciences.
Middlebury’s next leader will inherit an impressive institution following the successful, nearly decade-long tenure of President Laurie Patton. Over the past decade, Middlebury saw its highest demand for enrollment in the undergraduate College, experienced record fundraising, and launched important programs such as the Collaborative in Conflict Transformation and Energy2028, Middlebury’s pioneering renewable energy plan. The Middlebury experience produces fiercely loyal alumni as evidenced by support for its $600 million capital campaign, the most ambitious in its history, which has seen enormous success and is running one year ahead of schedule. The institution’s place-based assets include degree-granting campuses on both U.S. coasts and schools abroad in 16 countries that have positioned Middlebury as a truly global institution. Its people include an accomplished and collaborative Board of Trustees and a dedicated community of 5,500 students (of whom close to 2,800 are undergraduates), 808 faculty, and 1,353 staff across all of its programs, which includes those who work and study in shorter summer programs at many of its schools. More information on the breakdown across Middlebury’s schools and programs is available in the appendix.
As Middlebury’s new leader assumes the presidency, priorities for the next administration include increased attention to the changing landscape of higher education with a forward-thinking commitment to the liberal arts and sciences; a careful eye on financial sustainability and academic programs of the highest quality; and a focus on faculty success, staff satisfaction, and student success and well-being. The president will also maintain the undergraduate College’s strong and mutually beneficial relationships with the town of Middlebury and the state of Vermont, which are critical to the success and mission of the institution.
To conduct this search, the Middlebury College Board of Trustees has named an 18-member search committee that includes broad representation from the institution’s faculty, staff, students, administrators, alumni, and trustees. The committee is assisted by the executive search firm Isaacson, Miller. Inquiries, nominations, and applications, which will remain confidential, should be directed to the search firm here.
THE ROLE
Middlebury’s next president will carefully inventory and assess Middlebury’s many strengths and assets across its schools and programs to work toward a more cohesive integration that impactfully enhances and defines the Middlebury experience for all constituents. The president will partner with the greater Middlebury community to craft a vision and strategy for the institution’s next decade, one that ensures financial sustainability, pushes academic excellence, and champions student success, engagement, and belonging, while capitalizing on Middlebury’s characteristic ambition and drive to propel it to a next level of eminence.
The president is the chief executive officer of the institution, and in addition to setting institutional vision and strategy, is responsible for the overall supervision and management of Middlebury; developing and maintaining relationships with a diverse array of constituents within the institution, and in the greater community; and representing the institution externally in support of Middlebury.
The president is supported in this work by the senior staff. Direct reports to the president include the executive vice president and provost; executive vice president for finance and administration and treasurer; vice president for student affairs; vice president for advancement; vice president for communications and chief marketing officer; vice president of strategic enrollment and dean of admissions; vice president for equity and inclusion; general counsel, chief risk officer, and secretary of the corporation; and chief of staff, deputy general counsel, and associate secretary of the corporation.
The president reports to Middlebury’s Board of Trustees and works closely with the leadership of the board. Middlebury is governed by a board of 35 voting members and 23 emeriti trustees. The president serves as an ex-officio member of the board. The trustees come from a broad range of professional backgrounds, locations, and constituencies. Ted Truscott ’83 presently serves as chair of the board, and Karen Stolley ’77, Leilani Brown ’93, and Kirtley Cameron ’95 serve as vice chairs. This strong and energetic board will act as a true partner to the next president.
KEY OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR THE PRESIDENT
Building upon Middlebury’s strong foundation, the president will address the following challenges and strive to use them as opportunities to further strengthen the institution and its full portfolio of programs, positioning Middlebury for success and resilience for decades to come:
Create and execute a cohesive vision for the future of Middlebury
In 2018, Middlebury adopted its strategic framework entitled Envisioning Middlebury. Informed by a year of community conversations, the framework outlined refreshed mission and vision statements, the directions that would inform the next decade of Middlebury’s evolution, and the principles that bind the Middlebury community. The next president will have the opportunity to embrace the institution’s history and recent achievements, and culminate successful projects currently underway such as the capital campaign and Energy2028. Looking to Middlebury’s next decade, the president will bring a fresh eye to long-term strategy, working with a collaborative board, a talented senior leadership team, and a caring community to identify and refine the institution’s mission, goals, and direction, developing clear performance indicators to support these efforts. The next president will be curious and open-minded, willing to engage in conversations around Middlebury’s identity while strengthening the value proposition for a private, residential liberal arts and sciences education with select graduate programs and a distinctive global reach. The president will increase interconnection and capitalize on collaborative opportunities across Middlebury’s programs and campuses.
The members of the president’s senior leadership team will serve as critical players in the execution of Middlebury’s newly defined strategic priorities, and the president will bring a systems-thinking orientation to the team to enhance cross-collaboration and unity of action, while championing a culture of open communication, transparency, and respect.
Cultivate academic excellence
Middlebury’s high-quality academic programs are the most important contributor to the institution’s value and reputation. The next president will help define academic excellence at Middlebury and ensure that Middlebury continues to draw, serve, and create exceptional students, faculty, and scholars. The president will partner with a strong leadership team to identify areas of academic opportunity and ensure its academic programs remain agile and responsive to changes in pedagogy and technology so that Middlebury continues to deliver an exceptional academic product for years to come. As artificial intelligence and other technologies rapidly impact society and the many fields Middlebury graduates pursue, the foundation of Middlebury’s education fostering critical thinking and global perspective will be essential to the evergreen education that prepares students for lives of purpose and impact.
Carve a path toward financial sustainability
Middlebury’s financial health is imperative to its need-blind mission and its aim of access, which is increasingly jeopardized by rising inflation and changing socioeconomic demographics. With an estimated endowment of $1.6 billion, Middlebury is among the wealthiest private liberal arts colleges in the country. However, its endowment lands in the middle of its selective liberal arts peers, many of whom are smaller in size. Over the past decade, Middlebury has made impressive strides in reducing its endowment draw and addressing a structural deficit in many units across the institution, but it continues to be challenged by a lingering deficit, most of which resides within the Middlebury Institute. As it implements a three-year plan to address the financial sustainability of the Institute, the next president must work closely with the Institute to maintain its stellar academic quality and reputation, leverage its potential to provide exciting opportunities for undergraduate students, and also address persistent financial challenges.
Middlebury’s next president will closely monitor the whole of Middlebury’s finances, build and realize a strong institutional financial strategy, and make deliberate fiscal decisions with effective measures of accountability. As a good financial steward, the president will be a persuasive champion of fiscal responsibility to the entire Middlebury community.
Enhance philanthropic support
Strong fundraising will allow Middlebury to continue to ensure that its world-class education is affordable and accessible to talented students across the country and the globe and to find new funding to extend and enhance programs such as the Collaborative in Conflict Transformation. Middlebury’s next president will inherit the momentum of its most ambitious campaign to date, which launched publicly in October 2023 with a goal of raising $600 million by July 2028. With over $460 million raised less than one year into the public phase, the next president has an opportunity to set an ambitious path for the next campaign and engage new and longtime donors.
Enable the success of a talented faculty
Middlebury faculty are at the core of the institution’s mission and success, and the president will be a champion for high-quality teaching and top scholarship. Within the College, the president will work to forge trust with the faculty body and will support the recruitment, promotion, retention, and satisfaction of a highly qualified faculty committed to long-term living in Vermont. The College recruits and attracts faculty from top institutions and graduate programs, and the president will continue to prioritize a highly competitive salary and benefits package to ensure that Middlebury’s faculty pipeline remains best in class. Partnering with the provost, the president will work with faculty leadership to carefully consider complicated and competing choices around faculty teaching load and salary at the College. Across all Middlebury programs, the president will continue to prioritize and enable the high-quality teaching and scholarship that defines the Institute, the Schools, and Bread Loaf, whose faculty expertise and accomplishments help to broaden Middlebury’s reputation beyond Vermont and the liberal arts and sciences.
As the student body at Middlebury has become more diverse, the College has heightened attention to increasing the diversity of its faculty in many dimensions. The next president will continue to champion recruitment and retention to build on a talented and diverse faculty who contribute to a rich network of ideas.
Strengthen the student experience for Middlebury’s high-achieving, diverse student population
The appeal of a Middlebury experience remains as strong as ever, and the College has experienced years of record application numbers and enviable yield rates. As students work hard to gain admission to Middlebury, the next president will work to sustain student pride and belonging throughout the Middlebury journey for all students, focusing on holistic student success, including physical and mental well-being, academic achievement, and inclusion and belonging. Middlebury’s students crave more opportunities for community building and engagement, and the president will work with senior leaders to prioritize the building of an active social life, which is key to a successful undergraduate residential community.
The global pandemic impacted student learning in myriad ways, and over the next decade, many incoming Middlebury students will face the impacts of learning losses from their pre-Middlebury journey. The institution’s next president will take interest in this topic and explore ways to ensure that all Middlebury students have access to the whole array of the College’s rigorous academic program. Additionally, both inside and outside the classroom, Middlebury’s administration and faculty have worked to promote collaborative and compassionate dialogue across differing perspectives on campus, and the next president will sustain and augment opportunities for conversation across difference.
Further prepare Middlebury for the changing landscape of higher education
As higher education receives increased scrutiny from external forces, the next president will work to balance a fierce commitment to the institution’s educational mission of liberal arts and sciences and its contributions to a robust public sphere with a forward-looking view that anticipates changes in educational policy, financial sustainability, and consequential changes in technology that impact the learning and employment landscapes. The president will be a thought leader in defining the value of the liberal arts and sciences model, the opportunities offered by a network of interconnected academic entities that draw beyond the liberal arts, and the role Middlebury plays in the evolution of higher education. The president will serve as a thought partner to senior leaders and the board in articulating Middlebury’s vision for the future, setting a path forward, and bringing along the Middlebury community on this journey.
Sustain a mutually beneficial relationship with the town of Middlebury and greater Vermont
Though Middlebury has grown into an institution of international reach and renown, its main campus in Vermont retains the essence of its early identity as “the town’s college.” Middlebury holds a long-standing commitment to supporting the town of Middlebury, Vermont, including through community and infrastructure projects such as recent multimillion dollar investments in a local housing project and the expansion of a local childcare center in town.
Middlebury’s staff are highly devoted to the institution, and the College employs its entire workforce directly and not through third-party contractors. This unique structure acknowledges the staff’s dedication and sense of pride in being part of the Middlebury community. The next president will embrace Middlebury’s positioning as a key contributor to the local economy and culture of the town and of the Champlain Valley, remaining responsive to community needs.
THE SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATE
Middlebury seeks a visionary president whose accomplishments in leadership and commitment to academic excellence will direct and inspire the institution. The search committee understands that no single candidate will have all the ideal qualifications, but it seeks candidates with the following experience, abilities, and characteristics:
- Successful experience as a strategic leader of a complex, multifaceted organization;
- The ability to combine a forward-thinking vision—anticipating changes in higher education—with a fierce commitment to the liberal arts and its evolving and critical role in a rapidly changing world that is influenced by data and AI;
- The ability to energize and inspire students, faculty, staff, alumni, board members, and external stakeholders around a collective vision;
- A strong understanding of financial strategy, planning, and accounting, including budgeting and measurement of operating performance;
- The ability to lead strong management teams, delegate responsibility and authority, and be decisive with appropriate collaboration;
- The ability to execute ambitious plans with an entrepreneurial spirit and fiscal responsibility;
- A highly developed understanding of academic values and culture, including shared governance; a deep appreciation for faculty and scholarly work; a history of support for academic excellence;
- A keen understanding of enrollment management across undergraduate and graduate markets;
- A clear commitment to a global network of undergraduate and graduate education and a commitment to student success and well-being;
- A personal commitment to, and professional record of, success in advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion;
- A honed talent for managing crises; the capacity to deal with and lead through uncertainty;
- The capacity to represent Middlebury compellingly to donors and to lead a constantly improved advancement effort; the ability to energize both new alumni and past donors to support the institution;
- An aptitude for clear, compelling, and adaptive communication;
- Knowledge of current and emerging issues, trends, and strategies in higher education;
- Unquestioned integrity, trustworthiness, sound judgment, and ethics.
TO APPLY
Middlebury has retained the national executive search firm Isaacson, Miller to assist in this search. All inquiries, nominations, referrals, and applications should be sent electronically and in confidence to
Kate Barry, Partner
Ericka Miller, President and CEO
Diana Carmona, Senior Associate
Isaacson, Miller
Boston, MA | Washington, DC
https://www.imsearch.com/open-searches/middlebury-college/president
Middlebury College does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other reason prohibited by law in provision of employment opportunities and benefits.
APPENDIX: ABOUT MIDDLEBURY
HISTORY
Middlebury was founded as a college at the dawn of the 19th century by townspeople seeking to build a local institution in the small New England town of Middlebury, Vermont, with a mission to train young men from Vermont and neighboring states for ministry and other learned professions. Though Middlebury largely served its neighboring community in its first century, the College opened educational opportunity to populations traditionally excluded from higher education. In 1823, Middlebury graduate Alexander Twilight became the first African American citizen to earn a baccalaureate degree at an American college. In 1883, Middlebury began admitting women students to the College, nearly a century ahead of many of its contemporary peers.
One hundred years later, Middlebury turned its orientation to include the larger New England region beyond its immediate community. During the first half of the 20th century, the College modernized its curriculum, increased its enrollment more than twofold, established graduate programs in the Bread Loaf School of English and the Language Schools, and tripled its endowment. In the late 20th century, Middlebury expanded its student and faculty size; built new facilities such as its science center, library, residence halls, and athletic facilities; and continued to grow in academic quality and prestige to become an institution of national renown.
In the new millennium, Middlebury further expanded its global network of educational programs through its 2010 acquisition of the Monterey Institute of International Studies to complement the school’s known leadership in language instruction, environmental studies, international programs, and innovations in experiential learning. In 2015, the Institute was renamed the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (the Institute or MIIS). With this acquisition, Middlebury became home to critical research and training centers across nonproliferation, counterterrorism, and economic and policy analysis, including the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Middlebury’s graduate and undergraduate students take courses from or work as research assistants with faculty and experts across MIIS’s centers. See the section below for more information about the Institute.
A noted leader in environmental stewardship, Middlebury has long been committed to curbing campus carbon emissions, culminating in its 2016 achievement of carbon neutrality, marking the undergraduate College as one of the first American institutions of higher education to reach this designation. In 2019, the College unveiled Energy2028, a plan to address the threat of climate change through the divestment of fossil fuels and a complete shift to renewable energy by 2028. A partnership with local farms, waste managers, and the state government has created the largest biodigester in the eastern United States, which utilizes local food waste and manure to pump renewable fuel to the College’s campus. Recently, Middlebury also completed a five-megawatt solar field that will produce more than 40 percent of the College campus’s electrical needs. In 2022, the multi-stakeholder plan for Energy2028 was a featured case study by Harvard Business School.
In 2018, Middlebury leadership embarked on a strategic planning initiative entitled Envisioning Middlebury to help the institution engage in a new set of strategic directions. Through community-wide conversations, the leadership identified major themes for prioritization that included furthering Middlebury’s global connections, strengthening place-based experiential learning, building on Middlebury’s goals around intercultural communication, and connecting existing efforts across the wider institution, all to the end of preparing students to lead engaged, consequential, and creative lives, contribute to their communities, and address the world’s most challenging problems.
In 2022, Middlebury received a $25 million grant from an anonymous donor to create a cross-disciplinary program focused on conflict transformation. The largest curriculum-specific gift in the school’s history, and to be funded over seven years, the grant created the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation, which has worked to expand the community’s knowledge, skills, and dispositions to transform conflict into more constructive dynamics. The collaborative has offered courses across Middlebury’s academic entities as different practice grounds for coming to terms with the complexities of conflict, identity, and cultural connection.
FINANCES
As of June 30, 2024, Middlebury’s endowment is estimated at $1.6 billion, and over the past 10 years, the endowment has averaged an 8.9 percent return annually. The endowment comprises 1,600 individual funds with varied purposes across the institution, wherein most are restricted to a specific use. Middlebury’s endowment is significantly larger than the majority of college and university endowments; however, nine peer institutions have endowments that substantially exceed Middlebury’s. Middlebury places in the middle of 21 comparison group schools in endowment per student. Increasing the endowment continues to be a major focus of institutional fundraising.
In 2016, Middlebury was facing a structural deficit nearing $40 million. Through the action taken by President Patton and her administration, the deficit has been largely addressed, though the institution continues to face a lingering deficit in the range of seven-to-eight million dollars, a considerable part attributable to the Middlebury Institute, which is challenged by changing trends in the graduate marketplace. Still, the gains in addressing the institution’s deficit have allowed Middlebury to draw less from its endowment and allow the investment to grow.
The institution currently operates with an approximate yearly budget of $330M. Net tuition revenue remains the greatest source of operating income, at approximately three-fifths of total revenue. Middlebury’s tuition has a discount rate of 31 percent, and the institution continues to hold an AA long-term credit rating, as affirmed by Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings.
In fall 2023, Middlebury publicly launched the $600 million For Every Future: The Campaign for Middlebury, the most ambitious fundraising effort in its history, and the past three years have seen the largest fundraising totals in Middlebury’s history. The fundraising priorities for the campaign include financial aid and access, academic excellence, immersive and experiential opportunities including internships, and ongoing and future capital projects.
MIDDLEBURY’S ACADEMIC PROGRAMS
Throughout the past several decades, Middlebury has worked hard to build an international infrastructure of pre-eminent programs, including the core jewel that is the undergraduate College; the global affairs incubator that is the Institute of International Studies; the literary force of the Bread Loaf School of English and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences; and the linguistic and intercultural powerhouses of the Language Schools and the Schools Abroad.
MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE
Middlebury College is a highly selective, residential college, and one of the nation’s top institutions for the liberal arts and sciences, offering its students a broad, deep, and flexible curriculum that looks to inspire its undergraduates to grapple with challenging questions about themselves and the world and foster the inquiry, equity, and agency necessary for them to practice ethical citizenship far beyond their time at Middlebury. Throughout their academic careers, Middlebury students develop a breadth of experience across many fields and disciplines, as well as in-depth study in one area defined by the major. The College offers 46 majors and maintains a student/faculty ratio of 9:1. Over the past several years, the most popular majors have included economics, computer science, international and global studies, neuroscience, and English.
The Middlebury curriculum operates on a 4-1-4 academic calendar, which allows students to enroll in four courses in the fall term, four courses in the spring term, and a single course, internship, or independent study during the winter term.
Over the past few years, the College has gained significant grant and foundation support for research, and substantially increased funding for powerful pedagogical practices like problem-based learning, public humanities at the Axinn Center for the Humanities, and inclusive pedagogy in the STEM fields. This includes midd.data, an interdisciplinary initiative designed to prepare all students, regardless of major or discipline, to rigorously and critically evaluate data and data-driven arguments from a variety of perspectives; discover insights from data; form their own data-driven arguments; effectively communicate their findings; and learn and apply all of these skills in the context of their own disciplinary interests. In 2019, the NECHE accreditation visiting team recognized the institution for its leadership in integrating experiential learning in the classroom. Entrepreneurship programs have been strengthened, with the recent endowment of the Elizabeth Hackett Robinson ’84 Innovation Hub, and internship funding has grown to $1 million annually.
Faculty and Staff
Middlebury College’s 365 world-class faculty are renowned for their excellence in and dedication to outstanding teaching and scholarship. The composition of the faculty reflects Middlebury’s twin commitments to the acquisition of broad-based skills and in-depth knowledge about the world’s most consequential and challenging issues. Nearly three-quarters of faculty at the College serve in tenured or tenure-track positions, and a smaller group of faculty serve in short-term visiting capacities, infusing the curriculum with cutting-edge developments. About half are women, and around 18 percent of faculty are from racial groups traditionally underrepresented in academia. Ninety-three percent of faculty possess a terminal degree. Middlebury’s faculty are drawn to the College specifically for the opportunity it offers them to balance a high level of scholarship with an outstanding commitment to student learning in the context of a residential college. Faculty build close connections with students in Middlebury’s intimate classrooms and engage with and support students outside the classroom at arts performances, athletic matches, and over meals in dining halls and in faculty homes.
The Middlebury community is additionally supported and served by over 1,000 committed and talented staff members, including senior administrators, managers, and those on the front line of providing student support and supporting the full range of campus operations. Staff play a central role in creating and sustaining a strong College community. Many staff are generationally loyal to Middlebury and hold long tenures with the College. The College is providing significant financial support for the expansion of a local childcare center and the construction of affordable and market-rate housing in the town of Middlebury to help address the housing shortage and rising cost of living that has led many employees to live outside the town.
Students
Middlebury’s nearly 2,800 undergraduate students are active and engaged on campus, in Vermont, and around the globe, forming a strong, diverse, and supportive community for living and learning. The residential undergraduate experience promotes the educational and personal development, as well as personal responsibility, of all students. Middlebury requires all active, full-time students to live on campus, with limited exceptions, encouraging students to participate fully in all aspects of the residential college environment. Within the College’s 60 on-campus housing facilities, all first-year students are assigned to first-year communities, while all sophomores live together in sophomore buildings. Additionally, the College provides multiple academic and special-interest houses, including 10 language houses and two student-built, award-winning solar-powered houses.
Students regularly participate in internships, community engagement, the arts, social activities, community service, varsity athletics, and club and intramural sports that inspire collaboration, leadership development, personal growth, creativity, and community problem solving. Students can choose from over 200 student organizations to engage with, which range from academic to performance based, to service and religious based. Students enjoy many traditions, including Nocturne, which is an arts performance weekend showcasing student art and performance art, and Middlebury’s Winter Carnival, the oldest student-run carnival in the nation. Central to that weekend are the NCAA ski events for alpine and Nordic skiers, and other festivities such as a bonfire, an ice show, and the Winter Carnival Ball.
After Middlebury, students enjoy strong postgraduate outcomes. Six months after graduation, 89 percent of students are employed or pursuing postgraduate education. Middlebury students and graduates maintain a 95 percent acceptance rate into medical school and a 93 percent acceptance rate into law school.
Athletics
Athletics form an essential piece of the holistic educational and social experience at the College, which is a member of the NCAA Division III and the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC). In recent years College athletes have won numerous NESCAC and NCAA championships, including three NCAA championships for women’s teams during the 50th anniversary of Title IX. The College’s ski team has a strong legacy of success, and its alumni have later competed in the Olympic Games, World Championships, and on both national and domestic teams.
The College also provides club, intramural, and recreational athletic opportunities for all students, and its campus includes state-of-the-art athletic facilities, such as the 11,600-square-foot multilevel fitness center; the Chip Kenyon ’85 Arena, a 2,200-seat ice hockey arena; an Olympic-size natatorium; the Bostwick Family Squash Center; and the Virtue Field House, which features a 21,000-square-foot turf field, a track, and other fitness options. There are several outdoor synthetic turf athletic fields for baseball, softball, football, lacrosse, men’s soccer, and field hockey, and the College is also in the process of constructing new outdoor tennis courts, which will be available this October. Both students and community members have access to Middlebury’s 18-hole golf course, located on the edge of campus, the Middlebury Snowbowl and Rikert Outdoor Center, and the 18-mile Trail Around Middlebury, which encircles the village of Middlebury.
Admissions and Enrollment
In recent years, the College has experienced its three highest years of undergraduate applications, and admission to the school is classified as highly selective with a 12 percent acceptance rate for applicants to the Class of 2028. As of fall 2024, the College has nearly 2,800 undergraduates enrolled, though typical undergraduate enrollment is around 2,580 students. Like other institutions, Middlebury experienced atypical enrollment trends following the pandemic, and projects a return to pre-COVID enrollment levels in fall 2025.
Within the matriculated Class of 2028, 26 percent of students identify as people of color, 16 percent are first-generation, and 14 percent are international. Middlebury students hail from high schools far beyond New England, with 42 states and territories and 51 countries represented in the Class of 2028. Consistent with many of its peer institutions, the College saw slight drops in enrollment among students of color in the first year following the Supreme Court’s decision to end the consideration of race as a factor in the holistic application review.
Middlebury remains committed to access and is one of a handful of institutions to be need-blind for domestically admitted and enrolled students and meet 100 percent of demonstrated need for all admitted and enrolled students. For the 2024–25 school year, approximately 50 percent of undergraduate students are receiving some form of financial assistance, primarily in need-based grants, federal and state grant programs, work-study, and loans. Around 16 percent of students are recipients of a federal Pell Grant. In the 2023–2024 application cycle, Middlebury received nearly 13,000 applications and saw a yield rate of approximately 44 percent, signaling a continued strong demand for a Middlebury education.
Campus and Location
Located in central Vermont and nestled between the Adirondacks to the west and the Green Mountains to the east, Middlebury College is a campus of profound natural beauty. Across Vermont’s Champlain Valley, the College owns about 6,000 acres, much of which consists of forests and farmlands conserved in perpetuity. The main undergraduate campus in Middlebury spans 350 acres, which includes extensive athletic and recreation space such as the campus golf course on its periphery. Twelve miles east of the main undergraduate campus is the College’s ski area, known as the Snowbowl, just beyond the Bread Loaf campus, which is located in 30,000 acres of forested land in Ripton, Vermont. New capital projects on campus include a brand-new first-year residential dorm located in the center of campus, which will be completed in spring 2025, as well as a new art museum, which will help integrate art into the entire liberal arts and sciences curriculum in “the largest classroom on campus.”
Middlebury continues to honor its roots as “the town’s college” and its long-standing commitment to supporting the town of Middlebury, including through community and infrastructure projects. Recently, the institution purchased land in the town of Middlebury and has partnered with private and government entities in a significant investment in the local housing market to construct affordable and market-rate housing to mitigate a housing shortage in the state of Vermont and create additional housing opportunities for Middlebury’s faculty and staff. In 2023, Middlebury also authorized a $5 million unrestricted gift toward the construction of a larger childcare center that is projected to reach completion by summer 2025, which will be accessible to Middlebury staff, faculty, and community members, and will help to address the dearth of childcare in the region.
Middlebury also provides significant financial support to the town, which has included multimillion dollar contributions to the construction of a town bridge, new town offices, and a recreation center.
MIDDLEBURY INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES AT MONTEREY
The Institute was founded in 1955 as the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies from a vision for a graduate school that would promote international understanding through the study of language and culture. Today named the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, the Institute officially became part of Middlebury in 2010 and continues to educate professionals to advance understanding, promote peace, and drive change in pursuit of a more just world. Home to some of the world’s leading experts in global security, sustainability, development, education, and language services, the Institute offers master’s degree programs in several international policy areas and nondegree and master’s degree programs in translation, interpretation, and language education. Graduates of the Institute regularly go on to impactful roles with the United Nations and the U.S. State Department, among other organizations worldwide. Middlebury recently created a new division at the Institute, Middlebury Institute Online, to develop and offer online degree programs, in response to the changing market for master’s degrees.
The Middlebury Institute is home to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies with offices in Monterey, California, Washington, D.C., and Vienna, Austria, as well as the newer Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, and the Center for the Blue Economy, which provides economic and policy analysis related to ocean and coastal resources and issues. Center experts enhance the experience of Middlebury undergraduate and graduate students through classroom teaching and research support. The Institute benefits from its expert faculty, which include the world’s top experts in security and nonproliferation like Bill Potter, Jeffrey Lewis, and Jason Blazakis, as well as many rising stars in counterterrorism and international relations.
The Institute serves over 400 students from 53 countries who speak over 45 native languages, many of whom are current or future international government workers and representatives working toward the security of an increasingly interconnected world. MIIS offers 12 traditional master’s degrees; four online-only, asynchronous master’s degrees; and a variety of other programs. Over 95 percent of MIIS students attending in-person programs receive some type of scholarship. In fall 2021, MIIS opened its first-ever student residence hall in downtown Monterey. The building features 87 beds for students, most in single-occupancy rooms. With a tight housing market in the area and the growing need for flexible housing options, the new residence hall provides much-needed housing for students enrolled in a variety of MIIS programs and opens opportunities for Middlebury undergraduates in Vermont to study away in Monterey.
Earlier this year, Middlebury and Institute leadership began the implementation of a three-year plan aimed at addressing enrollment and the intimate, yet costly, educational model of the Institute to ensure the sustainability of this global policy incubator. The plan focuses the Institute’s academic program around three axes: global security, including nuclear nonproliferation and counterterrorism; environmental sustainability; and languages and intercultural communications.
THE LANGUAGE SCHOOLS
The Language Schools, founded in 1915 and now 13 in number, bring the world to Middlebury, and Bennington, Vermont, as well as five of the C.V. Starr Schools Abroad sites, where students immerse themselves in world languages and cultures through innovative, immersive instruction enforced by Middlebury’s signature Language Pledge: a promise to speak only the language they are studying for the duration of the program. In summer, courses are offered from beginning to graduate level in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. The Language Schools also offer study in Abenaki, English, and Portuguese at the undergraduate level only. The Language Schools are the only institution that grants Doctor of Modern Languages (DML) degrees, through a program established in 1927 that prepares teacher-scholars in two modern foreign languages as an alternative to the PhD. Language School students come from all 50 states and more than 75 foreign countries. Enrollments in the Language Schools continue to be strong with often over 1,400 students a summer enrolling despite national trends away from language learning. This past summer, the Language Schools enrolled over 1,380 students.
C.V. STARR SCHOOLS ABROAD
For over 50 years, the Middlebury C.V. Starr Schools Abroad have been helping students build foreign language fluency and intercultural competency. The Middlebury Schools Abroad offer overseas academic programs for undergraduates from Middlebury and other U.S. institutions, as well as graduate-level programs for students from the Middlebury Language Schools. Middlebury operates 16 schools worldwide across 32 sites. Each location is staffed by Middlebury personnel. Larger programs have Middlebury-operated facilities for classroom teaching by locally hired faculty. Students may take advantage of those courses alongside direct enrollment courses at local universities. One distinctive aspect of the Middlebury Schools Abroad is that students take courses in the language of their host country. As in the Language Schools, all students enrolled in the Middlebury Schools Abroad, except for the United Kingdom, sign the Language Pledge.
BREAD LOAF SCHOOL OF ENGLISH AND MIDDLEBURY BREAD LOAF WRITERS’ CONFERENCE
The Bread Loaf School of English, an intensive master’s and continuing education program for teachers and other professionals, was founded in 1920. Bread Loaf offers summer master’s and nondegree programs in English. Its main campus is located at the edge of the Green Mountain National Forest in Ripton, Vermont, about 10 miles east of Middlebury. The program in Vermont enrolls about 180 students in both degree-seeking and continued-education programming. Bread Loaf hosts a second program in Oxford, England, based at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford, which enrolls around 75 students, and whose program includes lectures by renowned Oxford faculty as well as access to Bodleian Library, the finest research library in the world. In addition, Bread Loaf recently began offering an intensive, nondegree summer program in global humanities on its campus in Monterey, California. Bread Loaf’s primary students are teachers, and its Bread Loaf Teacher Network (BLTN) allows its participants to collaborate with colleagues, administrators, families, and community organizations to create models for building and sustaining youth social action initiatives in urban and rural areas where social inequities are particularly prevalent. BLTN teachers are involved in impactful coalitions engaging communities that span Vermont neighborhoods to the Navajo Nation.
The Bread Loaf campus also hosts the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference,https://www.middlebury.edu/writers-conferences/writers-conference one of the oldest and most prestigious writer’s conferences in the country. At its inception in 1926 it was closely associated with Robert Frost, who attended 27 sessions. Other authors, faculty, and fellows associated with the conference have included Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, John Gardner, and George R.R. Martin. The campus is also home to the younger Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference and Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference.
SCHOOL OF THE ENVIRONMENT
The Middlebury School of the Environment is Middlebury’s newest and smallest school. Enrolling around 25 nondegree undergraduate students each summer from across the nation, the School of the Environment provides a six-week place-based study in sustainability and leadership. The school began on the Vermont campus, operated in China for several summers, and is now housed on the Monterey campus. Its Monterey setting allows students to explore the dichotomy of an ethic of environmental progressivism alongside a farming-heavy economy and environmental impacts such as drought, waste, and wildfires.