Since its establishment as a one-year normal school in 1911, Lyndon State College (LSC) has provided opportunity through education to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom—the 2,000 square-mile region that comprises the northeast corner of the State. While the Northeast Kingdom is among the most pristine and beautiful portions of the State, it is also the most rural and economically disadvantaged. In its earliest configuration as a Normal School, Lyndon’s role was to prepare qualified and experienced teachers to educate the students spread throughout the region.

As the Lyndon Normal School evolved into Lyndon Teacher’s College in 1945, the State of Vermont offered a full scholarship to many low-income students with the condition that the graduates worked as a teacher in Vermont for the same number of years that they received a scholarship. This agreement provided an opportunity for many low-income students to receive an education that would otherwise not have had such an opportunity. When Lyndon Teachers College became part of the Vermont State Colleges as Lyndon State College in 1962, the curriculum expanded to include liberal arts and professional degree programs, making a liberal arts-based education available to students who would otherwise not have been able to afford the opportunity.

Today, many of LSC’s students, nearly 60% of whom were first-generation college students in fall 2006 first-year cohort, come to Lyndon for the opportunity to improve their social mobility. A report on the U.S. workforce by the RAND Corporation notes that “the wage premium for a college degree compared with a high school diploma increased 30 percentage points, from 46 percent to 76 percent, between 1973 and 2001.” Wolfe and Haveman have further estimated that the social benefits of a college education—including reduced lifelong healthcare costs, reduced criminal activity, greater labor market efficiency, and better child-rearing—are likely to equal or exceed the individual benefits.¹ As Vincent Tinto notes, a recent U.S. Census Bureau study found that individuals completing a bachelor’s degree earn nearly $1 million more over their careers than do people with only a high school degree, and that gap is growing.

Students are also attracted to our nationally competitive academic programs like Television Studies, Meteorology, and Outdoor Recreation Management. Whatever their background, LSC’s mission is to prepare every student to succeed personally and professionally.


1 Lyall, Katharine C. and Kathleen R. Sell, “The De Facto Privatization of American Public Higher Education,” Change, Jan./Feb. 2006.