Biography of President Karen Gross
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 in New York City that designs, implements and studies programs to provide financial empowerment skills to consumers. She has served as a consultant to non-profit organizations, including United Way NYC, the Council on Legal Educational Opportunity and the Campaign for Working Families. She sits on several boards, including Vermont Campus Compact, the Bennington County Industrial Corporation, the Coalition for Debtor Education and the Marlboro College Graduate Center. She also sits on the Advisory Council of Office of Financial Empowerment of the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs and 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, Michigan Law Review and Notre Dame Law Review. Her most recent scholarly works on financial literacy education and student indebtedness appear in Behavioral Sciences and the Law, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Student Affairs, Financial Counseling and Planning Journal, and Leadership Exchange. Her prize-winning book, Failure and Forgiveness, was published by Yale University Press. She has also written pieces published in magazines, newspapers and journals including the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, University Business, New England Journal of Higher Education, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, InsideHigherEd.com and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is currently co-authoring a new book on how we handle (or mishandle) money in American society.
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 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 1999 Legal Aid Society Pro Bono Award, 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.
