About

The Columbia Climate School in the Green Mountains is a two-week residential program held at Vermont State University's 165-acre campus in Castleton, Vermont, designed for high school students interested in climate science, sustainability, and climate action. The program is a joint offering between Columbia's Climate School — established in 2020 as Columbia's first new school in 25 years, with over 1,200 researchers and staff — and Putney Student Travel, a family-run educational travel organization that handles logistics and operations. Academic content is delivered by Columbia Climate School experts and faculty across five thematic areas: the science of climate change, climate impacts and resilience, environmental justice, community impact, and science communication. The Vermont setting is used as an active learning environment, with field excursions into the Green Mountains, nearby towns, and Vermont's natural and agricultural landscape woven throughout the two weeks.

The program's curriculum is climate-action oriented rather than purely academic — both personal statements in the application ask students to reflect on their own climate commitments and community experience, and the program's explicit goal is to equip students to return home and take meaningful action. Students build a capstone climate action project over the two weeks, developing skills in scientific communication, community engagement, and interdisciplinary problem-solving. A 24-hour technology fast is built into the schedule, designed to deepen presence and peer connection in the field environment.

The scholarship structure is genuinely distinctive: full scholarships covering the entire program fee plus round-trip domestic travel are available for U.S. students from households earning up to approximately $60,000, and partial scholarships cover half the fee plus travel for households at higher income levels. This makes an otherwise expensive program meaningfully accessible for motivated students regardless of family income, provided they are U.S. residents. For students serious about climate as an academic and career direction — particularly those who have not yet had a residential experience with peers who share that focus — the Green Mountains program offers a credible Columbia-branded context for that exploration.